Author Description

This report translates concepts of mission resilience into practice for defense organizations. Drawing from academia, industry, and government, the authors distill four principles and specific activities as a framework for long-term change that defense organizations should adopt in pursuit of graceful extensibility: embrace failure, always be learning, improve your speed, and manage trade-offs and complexity. These principles build on previous work and combine discussion of procurement with operations, leaning on concepts and phrases used in slightly different ways by communities, like command and control (C2), which might think of managing trade-offs at speed as an issue of agility and biomimetics. Within each of these four principles are tangible practices that defense organizations can adopt to be more resilient. Mission resilience must be a priority area of work for the defense community.