Marc E Davis

Procedural Control: The Future of the Provincial Reconstruction Team Marc E Davis

Publisher Marketing: President Karzai, in his February 2011 speech to the Munich Security Conference, argued that the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) have performed below expectations due to conflicts in goals and coordination among the various organizations, specifically among parallel PRT command and control structures. These parallel command and control structures resulted in major command and control issues. The issues were a lack of flexibility and coordination, which counter the two command and control tenets of timeliness and coordination. The doctrine on positive control however, stressed the flexibility and coordination benefits of this method. The apparent failure of the PRT control method (positive control) to correct these command and control issues raised questions about the effectiveness of the positive control method. The ballistic missile defense (BMD) structure used the other control method (procedural control) to resolve issues associated with parallel command and control structures. The BMD structure used this method to provide flexibility to react to multiple priorities and provide seamless coordination during changes in these priorities. Since the ballistic missile defense structure also has parallel command structures, yet inflexibility and lack of coordination do not appear prevalent in this structure, can the ballistic missile defense control method (procedural control) be used to correct some of the PRT command and control issues? The study concluded that the use of procedural control (BMD) may successfully resolve the PRT's command and control issues of flexibility and coordination. These two issues were not solved by the use of positive control (PRT), as discovered by the analysis of successful command and control tenets. The prescriptive nature of positive control (PRT) hindered the flexibility and coordination necessary to overcome these issues. The descriptive nature of procedural control (BMD), on the other hand, minimized the effect of these issues