David Stephen Alberts (born 1942) is a former American Director of Research for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (NII).
Biography
David S. Alberts did his undergraduate work was at City College of New York where he received a bachelor's of arts degree in statistics in 1964. He received a master's degree in 1966 and a doctorate in operations research in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Alberts' academic career has included serving as first director of the Computer Science Program at New York University and has held professional rank posts at the NYU Graduate School of Business, the City University of New York, and most recently as a research professor at George Mason University.
He was the director of Advanced Concepts, Technologies, and Information Strategies; deputy director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, and the executive agent for Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program. This included responsibility for the Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology and the School of Information Warfare and Strategy at the National Defense University.
Dr. Alberts has chaired numerous international and national conferences and symposia and has authored or co-authored many publications, some of which are included in tutorials given by the IEEE and other professional societies. He has served as an officer in a number of professional societies and has contributed to AIAA, MORS, TIMS, AFCEA, and ORSA. At the local level, Alberts has served as Assistant to the Commissioner of the New York City Police Department.
Honors have included the Secretary of Defense's Outstanding Public Service Award, Aviation Week and Space Technology's Government/Military Laurel, and the inaugural Network Centric Warfare Award for Best Contribution to the Theory of NCW presented by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.
He is currently the president of the International Command and Control Institute (IC2I), a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that the body of literature created and inspired by the Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program remains accessible to researchers. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research and development center. His current research focuses on the relationships and inter-dependencies between and among approaches to C2 and Governance, composite network characteristics and performance, automation and autonomy, and cyber.
Work
In his book entitled The Agility Advantage, he proposes "agility" as the measure of choice for organizations, collections of organizations, processes, systems, and individuals engaged in complex endeavors (e.g. civil-military, cyber-security, economic development). A NATO research group, chaired by Dr. Alberts was formed to explore the ideas put forth in The Agility Advantage. In 2013, this group (SAS-085) completed its final report which received the 2014 NATO Scientific Achievement Award. In C2 Re-Envisioned: The Future of the Enterprise (2015), a collaboration with co-authors Marius Vassiliou and John R. Agre identifies and discusses four interrelated megatrends that are shaping the current practice of C2 and the challenges enterprises are and will continue to face in the 21st century. This book includes an analysis of historical examples and experimental evidence to identify the ways that C2 can go wrong. It presents a set of conclusions regarding the ways to get C2 right. The book was published in Chinese in 2017.
He co-authored an article with Mark E. Nissen, which was published in the International C2 Journal, entitled Toward Harmonizing Command and Control with Organization and Management Theory. Another recent article Agility, Focus and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control challenges not only long-held command and control beliefs but the very language of command and control itself.