Joint Task Force Considerations

Since the year 2013, Nigeria’s northeastern region epicenter of the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency waging war for the establishment of an Islamic State has witnessed mass participation of people in a civil militia group. The militia group colloquially describing itself Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) was formed to combat the Boko Haram rebellion. Perhaps, the participation of the CJTF in the combating activities was reportedly influential in reducing the Boko Haram hostilities in most communities. Prior to the CJTF, the counterinsurgency approaches of the Nigerian governments’ Special Joint Task Force and the Multinational Joint Task Force of the Member States of Lake Chad Basin Commission was faced with lackadaisical performances. Whereas the CJTF was reportedly successful, however, the interrupted participation of the people despite the attendant human and material cost has risen suspicion among the population and the critical literature about the groups’ true motivation. This article, therefore, investigated the motivations of the CJTF in northeastern Nigeria. The study was conducted through a qualitative approach designed in a case study. The data was collected from thirteen informants from three groups - CJTF, Community Leaders and State/Local Government authorities. The technique of data collection is in-depth interviews and non-participant observation. The finding revealed personal incentive factors of monetary/material gains, and the futuristic interest of employability drives peoples’ participation. To address the economic interests of the CJTF and as a panacea to prevent the manifestation of the security threats associated with the CJTF group, the study recommends for the establishment of charity centers to receive contributions from well to do citizens to ameliorate the economic needs of the participants. The government should also propound strong legal mechanisms to regulate the activities of the CJTF militia.

: Special Operations Forces (SOF) within a Joint Task Force are controlled by a Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF). Presently, JSOTF headquarters are formed around the core of the Theater Special Operations Command (TSOC), a service SOF headquarters, such as a Special Forces Group, or from a composite staff. These methods have significant shortcomings; the TSOCs ability to support SOF throughout the theater is reduced, a Special Forces Group is not trained or staffed to run a JSOTF at the component command level, and a composite staff element requires a substantial amount of time to operate effectively. This paper suggests an alternative way of providing a JSOTF headquarters that avoids these pitfalls. The recommendation is to establish a standing JSOTF headquarters within each TSOC. Included is an analysis of the major benefits and drawbacks of the proposal, an examination of alternative and interim solutions, and a proposed organizational structure for a standing JSOTF headquarters. Forming standing JSOTF headquarters is a controversial issue. No unit or service is anxious to give up personnel to support an organization whose role is invisible to most except during a crisis. Some will contend that there is no real problem. JSOTFs formed in the past where ad hoc and they managed to get the job done. Our country, though, has now been attacked on its own shores and as a consequence, the nation is fully engaged in a global war on terrorism. Winning this war is our military's top priority, but to win it, we must be agile and global in depth. Standing JSOTF headquarters would give SOF an almost immediate command and control capability that is effective at the earliest moments of a crisis. They could provide this capability without detracting from the TSOCs ability to support other, perhaps simultaneous SOF operations in the theater. SOF will lead the military's war on terrorism.

: Over the past few years the Department of Defense has been called on with increasing frequency to support civil authorities in an ever widening variety of domestic operations such as humanitarian relief, riot control and counter drug operations. These missions are often controversial and unpopular, especially when involving assistance to civilian law enforcement officials. Although U.S. military forces have supported civil authorities in actions of this nature since the founding of our country, considerable confusion exists over the legal basis for this support and the limits on the military's involvement. This study will clarify a number of misconceptions and address the role of the military in support of civil authorities during domestic operations as well as the effect of legal, historical and cultural considerations on its application. It additionally addresses a number of operational and philosophical challenges faced by the armed forces when dealing with expanded missions in support of law enforcement agencies.

For most modern governments, disasters are events that are demarcated from so-called normalcy by changes in organization and temporality. As much as the changes in procedures or staffing, these new structures are distinguished by their temporality. They are explicitly temporary organizations, designed to accomplish a specific task before dissolving and returning authority to the permanent organization. The choice to change to temporary organizations in times of crisis carries a number of implications. The switch to an entity that is both a part of the government, and distinct from it and that will disappear at some unspecified but unswervingly expected point in the future when the crisis is “over” points to a distinct separation between the disaster period and “normalcy,” and indicates that the disaster period will give way to normalcy again. It allows the government to portray the crisis as exogenous and separate from on-going policies, depicting it as the result of uncontrollable natural forces that must be dealt with on an ad hoc basis and ignoring links to long-term governance in areas of education, housing, health, and other areas. This paper uses original interviews and documentary data, collected as dissertation research, to look at the formation, dissolution, and occasional failure of temporary, government-based disaster management organizations across two events: Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan.

In this paper, we consider a novel Internet of Things (IoT) system in smart city called unmanned aerial vehicle‐ (UAV‐) assisted cognitive backscatter network, where a UAV is employed as both a relay and a radio frequency source to help the data transmission between ground IoT backscatter devices (BDs) and a remote data center (DC). However, since the IoT applications are usually not assigned dedicated spectrum resource in smart cities, these data transmissions from BDs to the DC should share the licensed spectrum of cellular users (CUs). Therefore, we aim to maximize the minimum uplink throughput among all BDs while avoiding severe interference to CUs via joint spectrum management and UAV trajectory design. To solve the problem, we propose an iterative method utilizing block coordinated decent to partition the variables into two blocks. For the spectrum management problem, we first prove its convexity with the transmit power and time scheduling and then propose a two‐step method to solve the two variables sequentially. For the UAV trajectory design problem, we resort to the fractional programming method to handle it. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly increase the average max‐min rate of the BDs while guaranteeing the acceptable interference to CUs with a fast convergence speed.

Waveform-agile tracking performance of cognitive tracking radar is significantly affected by the target maneuverability and increasing radio frequency interference (RFI) of other in-band systems. Therefore, a joint spectrum management and waveform optimization (JSMWO) policy is proposed to improve the maneuvering target tracking performance while mitigating RFI. First, the JSMWO policy is mathematically formulated to simultaneously optimize the spectrum occupancy and waveform parameters by minimizing a JSMWO-oriented three-term objective function. Specifically, the first two terms consider the tradeoff between interference avoidance and bandwidth utilization, and the impact of current spectrum occupancy action on future multistep rewards. The last subreward term incorporates the criterion-specific conditional predictive Bayesian risk, waveform library limitation, and real-time spectrum constraint generated by spectrum occupancy action. Second, to resolve the underlying mixed-integer, nonlinear, nonconvex multivariable optimization problem, by proper coupling analysis, we develop a four-stage iterative method to decompose the original JSMWO policy into two subpolicies and tackle them sequentially, which encompasses the deep Q-learning (DQL) based spectrum occupancy optimization, particle swarm optimization (PSO) based waveform optimization, and feedback information-based online learning. Specifically, the dual-network architecture and experience replay mechanism equipped in DQL can effectively address the delay reward and future multistep effects during the spectrum occupancy subpolicy optimization. Waveform optimization subpolicy is subsequently reformulated as an equivalent constrained optimization problem, wherein the PSO can effectively optimize the waveform parameters through interparticle interactions and iterations while satisfying the spectrum constraint and waveform limitation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the above-mentioned JSMWO policy.

Joint power control and spectrum allocation for cognitive radio networks via pricing

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) is man-aged within the Space and Missile Systems OrganizatiOn (SAMSO) (LA AFS, CA) of the Air Force Systems Com-mand. DMSP is an all blue-suit organization comprising: technical and management functions of the system provided by the Deputy for Defense Meteorological Satellite Systems, SAMSO, (LA AFS, CA); command and control functions provided by the 4000th Aerospace Applications Group, SAC, (OFFUTT AFB, NB); launch activities provided by the 10th Aerospace Defense Squadron, ADC, (Vandenburg AFB, CA); Logistics from AFLC; training from ATC; and Communications from AFCS. IMSP is a triservice program satisfying specific Army, Navy, and Air Force mission related requirements. The Air Force Global Weather Central, MAC, (OFF UTT AFB, NB) is the primary Air Force user of the satellite data.

This paper explores the problem of joint mode selection, spectrum management, power control, and interference mitigation for device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network. We consider a dynamic mode selection scenario, in which the modes (D2D or cellular) of the devices depend on optimal allocations. To improve the quality of service (QoS) for the users, the optimization objective in a corresponding problem is formulated in terms of buffer size of user equipments (UEs), which is estimated based on buffer status information collected by the UEs. The realizations of a resource allocation approach presented in the paper include its real-time and non-real-time implementations, as well as two modifications applicable to a standard LTE-Direct (LTE-D) network. Performance of the proposed algorithms has been evaluated using the OPNET-based simulations. All algorithms show improved performance in terms of mean packet end-to-end delay when compared to most relevant schemes proposed earlier.

The satellite telecommunication sector is continuously facing new challenges. Operators turn towards increasing capacity payloads with higher number of beams and broader bandwidth, in order to cope with exhausting orbital positions and to lower the cost of in-orbit delivery of bit. Only satellites able to provide high data rate connections to numerous users are expected to achieve affordable communication prices. On the other hand, as the telecom market grows and the range of offered services (HDTV, Video On Demand, Triple Play), operators call for more versatile solutions to quickly grasp new markets and to adapt to these evolutions over the average 15 years of a satellite lifetime. Flexible payloads have found an increasing interest for a number of years. Flexibility is considered as a means for a better commercial exploitation of a satellite fleet and a better allocation of resource in response to traffic evolution and/or changing business plans, with potential advantages such as a wider range of applications, less customization for specific missions, increased production runs of equipment, enhancement of reliability, reduction of equipment cost, reduction of program schedules [1]. Flexibility is expected to be offered in spectrum management and frequency plan, in coverage, or in the repeater power allocation. The industry is taking up the challenge both by improving current telecom satellites and offering new payload technology, more flexible and able to address the new markets. From a system integrator perspective, flexibility is as an opportunity to design more generic payloads, that can be customized during or after fabrication only, thus shortening the design-to-manufacturing cycle, and improving the industry competitiveness.

Social security of the state is the ability to guarantee and provide its citizens with safe and decent living standards. Study of the impact of the war on the state of national security, in particular human social security, will help to identify weaknesses in the state policy implementation in the political, economic and social areas. The impact of Russia's full-scale war against our country on the social security of Ukrainians requires substantiation of new, more effective mechanisms and tools for strengthening human social security in times of war. Under these circumstances, there is a need to apply new technologies to manage the socio-economic processes of the state for analysis and decision-making, and to reflect the current situation. These technologies will make it possible to predict scenarios and offer managers at all levels the best ways to achieve a balanced result. We need technologies that can effectively combine space and time with large amounts of special data in the form of attribute information about objects in the operational environment, background information about regions, climatic conditions, socio-economic conditions and processes in the region, etc. The need for prompt decision-making based on real indicators of anthropogenic, social, and environmental nature, taking into account the factors of space and time in a particular region or area of study, necessitates the involvement of specialized software platforms – geographic information systems that combine analytical capabilities with geospatial analysis. Today, a large number of general-purpose geographic information systems have been developed, but despite the variety of such software products, there is still a need to create specialized geographic information documents and databases that allow obtaining up-to-date geographic information data, the use of which leads to a real reduction in the time required to solve specialized tasks of information management systems. The analysis and decision support system in the environment of existing geographic information platforms will allow to take into account the influence of external factors, analyze the possibility of development, expansion, and monitor the state of the general environment when assessing the current state of input data, using information on the spatial distribution of the necessary resources, information on the competitive environment, etc. With the help of spatial and surface analysis modules, a GIS user can analyze spatially compatible objects and their interrelationships, taking into account the dynamics of their development. Currently, the world leader among geographic information systems is the ArcGIS products. It is a complete system that allows you to collect, organize, manage, analyze, exchange and distribute geographic data. Additionally, ArcGIS, depending on the type and specification of the platform, has other specialized modules that provide a wide range of opportunities for working with geodata and their visual display, namely: creation, management, visualization, analysis and exchange of geographic information. In addition, there are many compatible applications and extensions that integrate into the GIS platform and are focused on solving highly specialized tasks, such as assessing the state of the environment (water, soil, vegetation) or forecasting the development of natural phenomena and man-made emergencies. The article analyzes and substantiates the approaches to the use of a geographic information system as an effective tool for studying the impact of a full-scale war on human social security, improving the efficiency, completeness and quality of information and spatial support for management processes. The modern and full-featured ArcGIS system is considered as a platform that allows not only to form a geographic information system of any scale and purpose, but also to form on its basis an effective system of socio-economic monitoring, which is combined with decision support systems. The article presents an algorithm for studying the impact of a full-scale war on human social security using the ArcGIS system as an effective decision support tool with the use of spatially specialized databases.

The British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) began life in 1945 as a postwar administrative headquarters deployed in support of the civilian authority of the British zone of occupation, northern Germany. With the activation of a NATO unified command structure in 1951, BAOR became an integral part, along with Belgian, Canadian, and Dutch army units, of the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG). Deployed on the European Central Front with its NORTHAG sister formations, BAOR was a significant feature of NATO’s forward shield of ground forces to deter or, if deterrence failed, to repel a major Warsaw Pact offensive on the Continent. To improve its combat effectiveness BAOR was equipped since the early 1960s with tactical nuclear weapons, and in so doing, became the first formation of the British army trained to fight and prevail on a nuclear battlefield. The deployment of BAOR on the European Central Front was symbolic of British political intent vis-à-vis European security and was the military means by which Britain sought to deter a conventional or nuclear Warsaw Pact attack. The history of BAOR, then, is not simply a history of an army formation. It is a history of British European security commitments, of NATO military strategy, and of the changing character of land warfare after 1945. This annotated bibliography presents the best quality scholarship relating to BAOR, from its inception until its replacement under the conditions of the 1994 Options for Change defense review with the twenty-five-thousand strong British Forces Germany.

ABSTRACTThis article describes how the U.S. Army developed a new ad hoc medical formation, named Urban Augmentation Medical Task Force for the Department of Defense (DoD) in response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic in the Continental United States during the spring of 2020. We review the role of the DoD support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a part of Defense Support of Civilian Authorities.

All churches during the sixteenth century promoted their understanding of the fundamentals of Christian faith and demanded high standards of moral behaviour from their adherents. Where possible, clergy sought the support of civil authorities to assist in their efforts to enforce religious uniformity and moral discipline on ordinary people. Many of the alliances forged between clergy and princes or urban magistrates not only defended the orthodoxy of one church but also outlawed the practice of minority religions. Church institutions and state bureaucracies used schools, printed propaganda, censorship laws, and a regime of spiritual and secular sanctions in efforts to regulate church life, suppress alternative opinions and traditional forms of religiosity, and to introduce a more standard form of religious experience.1

: Over the last decade, the Army has increased its reliance on reserve forces for contingency operations. In 2008, the United States Army Reserve (USAR) transitioned from a Strategic Reserve to an Operational Reserve. This, along with President Obama's current strategic guidance, emphasized the need for the Army Reserve to streamline its structure and concentrate on its core competencies. In line with these core competencies, the Army's strategic guidance calls for an increased emphasis on Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA), a mission that the Army Reserve is well suited to perform. This paper makes recommendations to realign Army Reserve Aviation assets to achieve efficiencies and better support both the President's and the Army's strategic guidance. It proposes that, Army Reserve Aviation should transform its two attack reconnaissance battalions (AH-64) to assault battalions (UH-60) in order to realign with the component's mission and meet its DSCA support requirements. This paper also proposes the addition of a Theater Aviation Brigade (TAB) headquarters to the USAR aviation force structure in order to allow for greater flexibility in the component's ability to conduct mission command.