Greetings,
Recently I was requested by particular authorities in a city in Pakistan to help setup a proper civil defense service in lieu of the threat of terrorism and crime. The eventual goal is to have a group of citizen's interlinked via Civil Band radios and in direct touch with senior officials to report incidents, provide first look in case of lack of LE in an incident area & provide oversight of LE performance.
The civilians selected for this program are to be from various areas including professionals(Doctors, engineers etc) or retired military. As a prerequisite, any individual known or suspected of any political connections will not be considered.
I would appreciate any assistance in terms of organizational setup of such a force and how the Civil Band radio system could be setup.
Suggestions from all would be appreciated including those from other nations based on their ideas and experiences for Civil Defense.
@Joe Shearer @Desertfalcon @third eye @jhungary
Be advised, I am only requesting positive contributions and suggestions. Any needless pessimism without possible remedies or solutions( as certain members in PDF exist for) will be immediately deleted and the user banned from this thread.
First of all, thanks for tagging me, my expertise is defence and intelligence so my POV will be focus on these two group.
There are a few stage involved in this organisational network, I can only comment on each stage after I got more information from you, but to start, you will need to look at the OODA system and the OSINT aspect of matter.
OODA System
OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, it is a system design to build as a combat strategy, it is developed by John Boyd (Colonel USAF ret), the system deal with real time information process and how to react to real time threat and deal with it in an effective manner. It was developed for Fighter Pilot to use in a dogfight situation, but nowadays OODA applies basically anywhere. Now I am going to run thru the OODA with you using Civil Defence as an example.
Observe - Observe means to gather information, in your case, the observer to phone in or call in real time information for the command center to deal with. In an real time threat sense, as the situation unfold, the first problem you will encounter will be information flooding. Multiple source provide the same piece of information at the same time.
The second problem you will encounter is the quality of information, different people focus on a different stage of the same event, and some saw it in the beginning, some saw it late, meaning the raw information (or data) are mostly incomplete
Then come the third problem, which is basically the biggest, which is false information. Sometime people see things that does not actually happen, sometime enemy agent tried to confuse you by sending you conflicted report, it is your job to distinguish these false information and the real one.
One possible solution is that you have to allow a standardize information flow from your reporting agent, it does not matter how much your agent saw. A set piece of standardize reporting that will sieve out redundant information and only pass thru important detail for the command center to make decision.
Another advantage on standardize reporting will basically give you unbiased information, as you can focus on the incident itself, but not the impact (Politically, Economically, or otherwise)
Orient - After information being collected, the second part would be to process thru the information you obtained, and try to build a full picture for situational awareness
To build a full picture, the first step would be to understand what you want to do with the data, are you preventing an attack, or are you averting an attack? by doing so, you slim down the information you need and deciding which is important and which is not, you can formulate which course of action more effectively. For example, if you want to response to a terrorist attack, then obviously the location and number (Where and How many) is more important than the attacker's affiliation or personal trait (like age, sex and so on)
And then you will need to go over the useful information against a background situation. That means beside knowing what is unfolding, you also need to put your information against your own side and update your own information, for example, if the terrorist blow up a police station in the area, then of course you will have to write off that police station from your possible solution, otherwise you are sending help that does not exist anymore
Decide - Which is to make sense of your information. You can decide which plan you should execute. Also important on this stage is asset management. Which asset you have at hands against what do you need, the purpose is to make a decision based on the information collected and processed in the previous stage.
Another process to make sense of enemy intel is to seek out patterns both regular and irregular, and both friends and foes. Things like patrol pattern, ingress and egress pattern, all these thing you need to look at when you are deciding what is your next move.
Act and Feedback - Once you have chosen the best course of action, the next step is for you to act on this intel. You perform your action and see how this goes, and that will bring you back to the first step, and you also evaluate how effective your action is, and then restart the cycle.
On
OSINT.
OSINT focus on two main process.
1.) How to authenticate the information
2.) The Information network
On how to authenticate the information. You will need to establish a rules of thumb yourselves on how to verify the information that passed to you, you look at the incentive, background, and the confirmation. How a person volunteer the information matters (What is his/her purpose, what is his/her gain), his/her personal background matters, and of course, if more than one person report the same piece of information, the more believable that piece of information is.
On information network, most of the time people focus on the person that lead to the useful piece of information, but the person or people who lead to that guy that can provide you with the real juice is almost as important as the guy with the juice himself. Hence how do you build your information network is quite important on getting OSINT.
I cannot get into the issue deep as I am quite busy lately, so I hope this help you set up your civil defence network
