Graceful Degradation: A C2 Design Virtue for Our Times

Graceful degradation, or fault tolerance in engineering terms, refers to the ability of systems to continue functioning, at least for a time, after critical processes or sub-systems are compromised or destroyed. One popular concept of recent times, resilience, attempts to capture the graceful degradation idea. However, resilience is insufficient to account for a system that has the quality of graceful degradation. Two other related concepts, robustness and redundancy, complement resilience. This paper describes graceful degradation and its accompanying concepts, and applies them to Command and Control theory. It argues that graceful degradation needs to be designed into our organizational as well as our technological C2 systems. It points out that the new emphasis on mission command is one necessary and desirable approach to incorporating graceful degradation in Command and Control, but it is insufficient. The paper concludes that graceful degradation needs to be inculcated in the minds of leaders such that they apply the concept as a matter of course, rather than conscious application. The paper includes case studies that illustrate successful and unsuccessful graceful degradation in hardware, software, and humans.