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Military robotic swarming is expected to herald a disruptive change in warfare. This article analyses how both the technoscientific promises and problematizations of robotic swarming in the military relate to transformations in the way wars are cognized and conducted by liberal societies. This analysis will be conducted through the lens of a more-than-human biopolitics. Firstly, the paper traces how a new understanding of life, established by complexity sciences, has enabled entanglements and translations between different forms of life and how these have informed the military imaginaries and design principles of military swarming. Secondly, the problematization of robotic swarms as potentially running out of human control is re-interpreted in terms of this re-conceptualizing and appropriation of a more-than-human life. The central argument here is that a biomimetic robotic swarm not only inherits the desired properties of a natural swarm but also its inherent risks. Thirdly, it is analysed how military approaches to the government of robotic swarms and their dangerousness move to a less centralized and less direct form of Command and Control (C2), aiming to maximize the benefits of swarming while minimizing its risks. The article concludes by discussing how this new C2 paradigm of governing at the ‘edge of chaos’ points us to the need to rethink the legal ordering of swarming.
This chapter addresses how the pathways of legal strategy can be applied in practice. The first part of this chapter presents three case studies that show how firms can respond to common legal challenges. The mandate to stop sexual harassment, the protection of intellectual property rights, and the prohibitions related to anti-corruption are all used as examples of how each pathway can be applied with varying levels of effectiveness. The second part of the chapter explores how a firm can elevate its implementation of legal knowledge from one pathway to another. This part shows how companies can evolve their legal practices from avoidance to conformance, conformance to prevention, prevention to value, and value to transformation. Although not every legal issue is transformative, understanding how the pathways work in practice can help firms deploy their legal knowledge as effectively as possible.
Leadership in crisis response has traditionally been strongly centralized and hierarchical. Top-down command and control is popular, because a strict hierarchy and clear lines of command enable rapid decision-making and coordinated actions. Critics, however, have argued that centralization is both impossible and undesirable during crises, because leaders lack situational awareness and cannot control frontline responders from a distance. They argue that operational personnel should take charge to ensure an adaptive frontline response, potentially at the cost of efficiency and speed. The operational dilemma of crisis leadership revolves therefore around the tension between centralization and decentralization. To deal with this dilemma, it is useful to study how influence is exercised and power circulates during crises. Rather than a static authority structure, different types and phases of crises require different forms of leadership. Authority structures have to be tested and adjusted throughout the response, so they can be continuously co-constructed by frontline responders and operational leaders, as the complex and dynamic crisis situation evolves.
To provide standardized recommendations for the emergency department (ED) response to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) events by combining the human factors/ergonomics method of hierarchical task analysis with the theoretical framework for Work as Imagined versus Work as Done.
Methods:
Document analyses were used to represent CBRN response operational procedures. Semi-structured interviews using scenario cards were carried out with 57 first receivers (ED staff) to represent CBRN practice at 2 acute hospitals in England.
Results:
Variability existed in general organizational responsibilities associated with the CBRN response. Variability was further evident in top level CBRN tasks and CBRN phases at both EDs. Operational procedures focused on tasks such as documentation, checking, and timing. CBRN practice focused on patient needs through assessment, treatment, and diagnosis.
Conclusion:
The findings provide top-down and bottom-up insights to enhance the ED CBRN response through standardization. The standardized CBRN action card template embeds the choice approach to standardization. The standardized CBRN framework implements the streamlined categorization of CBRN phases. Work as Imagined versus Work as Done is a useful theoretical framework to unpack a complex sociotechnical system, and hierarchical task analysis is an effective system mapping tool in health care.
This chapter clarifies why blunt force regulation is so distinctive. It begins by outlining two underlying logics regulatory enforcement, namely, “rules-based” regulation (which prioritizes effectiveness) and “risk-based” regulation (which prioritizes efficiency). Drawing on case details, it then illustrates how blunt force regulation fits into neither category, offering neither efficient nor effective regulation in the long-term. Instead, it represents an unusual combination of indiscriminate enforcement (which devalues compliances) and arbitrary but inflexible enforcement (which increases regulatory distrust and business uncertainty). This raises the question: Why blunt force regulation?
Future naval and air forces will be comprised increasingly of unmanned and autonomous systems. Nearly 100 nations and nonstate actors currently operate unmanned and autonomous systems to support combat operations. These platforms have proven their ability to enhance situational awareness and improve mission performance. Unmanned systems will be used to augment manned platforms and will conduct missions that are considered dull, dirty and dangerous, thereby reducing risk to human life at a reduced cost. Introduction of these systems and vehicles will require states to modify how they characterize these platforms under international law as ships, warships, commercial aircraft and state aircraft to ensure that they are able to legally perform the missions that they have been designed to perform. This will require filling gaps in domestic and international law and regulations to better regulate and control the employment of these systems in the marine environment to ensure safety of navigation and overflight and protection of the marine environment.
The Iranian state is a complex political machine. Today’s Iran is a product of the combined forces of evolutionary change and abrupt political upheavals. The Iranian state is remarkable for its longevity and its combination of traditional and modern (Western) features, which has resulted from its long and varied life. The Islamic Republic is a product of a series of political compromises that have their origins partly in the bureaucracy created by the Pahlavis and partly in the interactions of the revolutionary coalition that wrested power from the monarch in 1979.
Effective administration of healthcare in an emergency setting, especially in field-hospital deployment where order must be established, needs assessed and limited resources allocated effectively, is considerably more complex than the regular patient–doctor interactions characteristic of routine times. Due to the complexity and uncertainty typical of such an environment, leadership is required not only by the field hospital staff but also by the affected public, which seeks leadership in those who are perceived to be the center of clinical service delivery.
This type of leadership demands organized command and control and practice of more than just basic leadership processes, and therefore requires, alongside the mission leader, a structured management and task-orientated chain of command.
For the hospital to operate effectively and independently, it is necessary to also define the organizational structure. The organizational structure discussed in this chapter is a model tested over the past three decades by the IDF Medical Corps hospital in numerous missions. This structure is generally similar to the basic structure of a small- to medium-scale hospital in routine times. At the same time, it allows more focused and simple managing processes required in non-routine scenarios such as emergencies or disasters.
The paper compares the effects of market-based (M-B) and command-and-control (C&C) climate policies on the direction of technical change and the prevention of environmental disasters. Drawing on a model of endogenous growth and directed technical change, we show that M-B policies (carbon taxes and subsidies toward clean sectors) suffer from path dependence and exhibit bounded window of opportunities: delays in their implementation make them ineffective both in redirecting technical change, (i.e. triggering a transition toward clean energy) and in avoiding environmental catastrophes. On the contrary, we find that C&C interventions are favored by path dependence and guarantee policy effectiveness irrespectively of the timing of their introduction. As the hypothesis of path dependence in technological change has received vast empirical support and it is a key feature of many models of growth, we argue that C&C policies should be seen as a valuable and non-equivalent alternative to M-B interventions.
Good staff procedure skills in a management group during incidents and disasters are believed to be a prerequisite for good management of the situation. However, this has not been demonstrated scientifically. Templates for evaluation results from performance indicators during simulation exercises have previously been tested. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the possibility that these indicators can be used as a tool for studying the relationship between good management skills and good staff procedure skills.
Hypothesis:
Good and structured work (staff procedure skills) in a hospital management group during simulation exercises in disaster medicine is related to good and timely decisions (good management skills).
Methods:
Results from 29 consecutive simulation exercises in which staff procedure skills and management skills were evaluated using quantitative measurements were included. The statistical analysis method used was simple linear regression with staff procedure skills as the response variable and management skills as the predictor variable.
Results:
An overall significant relationship was identified between staff pro-cedure skills and management skills (p ≤0.05).
Conclusions:
This study suggests that there is a relationship between staff procedure skills and management skills in the educational setting used. Future studies are needed to demonstrate if this also can be observed during actual incidents.