www.ndu.edu/inss DH No. 76 1
T
he sharing of information in complex civil-military operations
1
is im-
portant, yet actors rarely do it well. U.S. and allied military forces must
be able to communicate, collaborate, and exchange information eec-
tively with the local populations they seek to inuence, or they cannot achieve
the goals for which they have been committed. Nonetheless, experience from
stability operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, numerous humanitarian assistance/
disaster relief missions, and eorts to build the capacity of foreign partners sug-
gest that eective information-sharing is much harder than might be expected.
is paper sheds light on the diculties of setting up and sustaining projects to
share information in such situations and suggests ways to do better in the future.
e reasons are straightforward. Government practitioners are unfamiliar
with many of the technical solutions to ineective information-sharing. More-
over, information-sharing runs counter to long-held information-controlling
habits. Incentives rarely reward sharing and instead punish leaks. Projects that
try to mitigate information-sharing problems typically take a long time to devel-
op, need broad coalitions to implement, and have results that are hard to measure
and attribute. Many of the stakeholders do not have institutional ties and some
actively seek to minimize relationships with each other. As has often been seen
in projects in Afghanistan, changes in personnel and government priorities can
make projects hard to sustain. Collectively, the impacts have been detrimental to
information-sharing.
is paper draws on examples from Afghanistan to highlight some lessons
that members of diverse organizations have observed over a number of years.
2
Sharing to Succeed:
Lessons from Open
Information-sharing Projects
in Afghanistan
Defense Horizons
National Defense University
CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY
About the Authors
Linton Wells II is the Director of the
Center for Technology and National
Security Policy, Institute for National
Strategic Studies, at the National
Defense University (NDU). James
Bosworth is a Freelance Writer and
Consultant based in Managua, Nicara-
gua. John Crowley is an Information-
sharing Analyst at NDU and Research
Fellow in the Harvard Humanitarian
Initiative. Rebecca Linder Blachly is Di-
rector of Advancement, International
Programs, and Studies at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Key Points
Unless U.S. and coalition forces can
share information with the popu-
lations they seek to inuence in
complex civil-military operations,
they cannot achieve the goals for
which they were committed.
Information, communications,
and related support structures
inuence all aspects of complex
operations and need to be treated
as critical infrastructures and es-
sential services but rarely are.
Open information-sharing proj-
ects require sustained leadership
interest plus shared and stable
priorities among many parties.
Absent this emphasis, changes in
personnel, mission priorities, and
funding levels will make it hard
to develop, transition, and sustain
any such effort.
Observations from information-
sharing projects in Afghanistan
suggest several ways to change
behaviors that can turn lessons
observed thus far into lessons
actually learned.
July 2013
by Linton Wells II, James Bosworth, John Crowley,
and Rebecca Linder Blachly
