Chris Whitlock

Chris Whitlock has worked defense and national security issues for the past 30 years. For the last 20, he focused primarily on strategy consulting on intelligence issues from an analytic perspective. He co-founded and was the CEO of Edge Consulting, which applied empirical methods and management consulting techniques to advise on major programmatic issues confronting DoD and the Intelligence Community. He holds a B.A. in History (Mississippi), an M.A. in National Security (Georgetown) and an M.B.A. (George Mason).

Putting Irregular Warfare in Perspective Preparing for the New Norm of Conflict

Declared wars start and stop, but the conflicts between nations and groups around the world simmer continuously and boil over frequently. Speaking to the Air War College class in 1992, then CIA Director Robert Gates said, “We must expect continuing radical change and upheaval around the world – at times promising, at times frightening – before the form and patterns of a new era settle into place.” Two decades later, it is not entirely clear what the form and patterns of this new century are.

Irregular Warfare at Sea: A Case Study on National Defense Choices

National defense choices can leave a country vulnerable.  Military organizations routinely deal with risk and trade-offs.  But longer-term strategic defense choices—shaped by multiple factors including uncertainty about the future, the pressure of dominant current constituencies, and fiscal constraints that are difficult to “get right.”  Once a conflict begins a new set of options and trades emerge but the uncertainties, the pressure of constituencies and resource constraints remain (even in a national level mobilization).  In the United States, we are currently dealing with strategic choic

Empirically Based Intelligence Management: Using Operations Research to Improve Programmatic Decision Making

On May 14, 2012, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provided a memorandum to all departments and agencies on the need to use evidence throughout the Fiscal Year 2014 budget submission. The memorandum provides four pages of issues and approaches for using evidence in the development, evaluation, and management of government programs. OMB also encourages agencies to strengthen program evaluation through a dedicated senior leader, such as a chief evaluation officer reporting directly to the secretary or deputy secretary.

Assessing the Value of Intelligence: Lessons for Leaders

Applying power in all its forms to secure the present and future is ultimately a leadership challenge. That challenge is especially complex in the current century when the forms and patterns of security are changing in so many ways at an accelerated pace than ever before. The capabilities required to threaten a nation, region, or even global stability are available to both rich and impoverished nation states, as well as small networks of people who can and do operate relatively independent of any nation state. There is more data available than ever before to make sense of this era.

Partner
IBM Global Business Services
United States

Chris Whitlock has worked defense and national security issues for the past 30 years. For the last 20, he focused primarily on strategy consulting on intelligence issues from an analytic perspective. He co-founded and was the CEO of Edge Consulting, which applied empirical methods and management consulting techniques to advise on major programmatic issues confronting DoD and the Intelligence Community. He holds a B.A. in History (Mississippi), an M.A. in National Security (Georgetown) and an M.B.A. (George Mason).

Chris was trained as an Infantry officer in the United States Army and subsequently became a military analyst with the CIA. He is an expert in technical forms of sensing, having spent most of the past 20 years working projects to improve performance for imagery and signals intelligence systems. He has worked target problems in a variety of forms and countries, including Panama, Colombia, El Salvador, Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. He has led and worked on projects cutting across a range of mission areas including counter-insurgency, theater missile defense, counter-fire, suppression of enemy air defense, combat search and rescue, and combined arms maneuver. With respect to methods, Chris has applied multi-attribute utility theory, modeling, and various empirical approaches including the development of a Warfighting Applications Research approach and what came to be known as “Edge Methods.”