Senior Leader Information Environment Course (SLIEC)
Audience: Senior military officers and civilian equivalents (O-6 to O-8; O-5 by request).
Course Length: 2.5 – 3 days; scalable
Location: Colorado Springs, CO or Worldwide
Now available on GSA!
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Course Overview: The SLIEC gives participants both broad and deep insights into analyzing, planning for, executing, and assessing operations in the global information environment and its various information-heavy complex problem sets. The course focuses on grand strategy, strategy, and operations, helping participants understand how to align and sequence whole-of-government actions to gain advantage in digital-age complex problems and their counterpart operational environments. This is a graduate-level, seminar-style course.
Understanding the Global Information Environment – Participants begin with a discussion of what the global IE is, and how it relates to digital-age complex problems and operational environments. The focus for this lesson is understanding in general terms why and how the character of competition and conflict are changing, and what the disadvantages are for failing to keep pace.
Competition and Conflict in the Digital Age – Participants discuss how the new realities of the current century drive persistent threats to national and global security, and how they might advise policy makers as they respond to or try to get ahead of the problems and threats these new realities impose on us. The lesson focuses heavily on the character of digital-age competition and conflict—how it looks, what it means, and why it drives security concerns.
Organizational Structures and Processes – This block focuses on developing new organizational structures and processes for engaging with complex, digital-age problems over long periods of time. Participants discuss how to optimize structure and process by using strategic and operational design processes and “best practices.” Because most security issues are long-term, and in fact open-ended and generational in character, restructuring to address them effectively is an imperative part of national and international initiatives.
Playing the Long Game – Participants discuss a range of approaches and concepts for gaining and maintaining long-term advantage in information-heavy complex problems. These include non-lethal and lethal options for producing effects and ultimately achieving objectives and reaching a desired end-state in support of strategic priorities. While the ideal outcome is achieving objectives short of armed conflict, discussion focuses equally on the properly integrated employment of non-lethal and lethal effects within armed conflict. The concepts of integrated planning and campaigning receive particularly close attention.
The Future of Operations in the Global IE – The final block of instruction focuses on the concept and reality of integrated planning and campaigning as means for gaining advantage using combinations of effects across all instruments of national power. This use of combinations of effects across the whole of governments and alliances (rather than just military combined arms) is more important than ever given the speed and impact of information flows. Participants discuss combinations of effects in detail—what they are, why they matter, how to produce them, and why they are particularly important in the global IE, for digital-age complex problems, and within their associated operational environments.