Research for Experiments

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Game-Based Experimentation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness
November 1, 2005
The Naval War College (NWC) through its Warfare Analysis and Research Department (WARD)-is pursuing a program of research into designing militarily relevant and scientifically valid experiments to investigate shared situational awareness (SSA) in the evolving environment of U.S. Joint command and control (C2). One aspect of this research builds on the foundation of reproducible results obtained from CNA's prior work in the field of measuring SSA in a wargaming environment. This research memorandum documents the support CNA provided to the NWC-WARD for an experiment conducted in the spring of 2002. This experiment took the form of a series of games played by teams from the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Naval War College. The test-bed was the internet-based game SCUDHunt, developed earlier by CNA and ThoughtLink Inc. for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA). In this simple yet elegant game, players take the roles of sensor asset managers and attempt to deploy their sensors to search a small, gridded map for hidden "SCUD" launchers. Each sensor has different characteristics of coverage and reliability. To play effectively, the players must work together, sharing information and developing their shared situational awareness in order to find the SCUDs and make accurate strike recommendations.
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The Time is Now: Proposals for Two Enlistment Incentive Experiments
April 1, 2003
When Congress initiated Enlistment Bonuses (EBs) in the early 1980s, it required the Department of Defense to conduct experiments on how these incentives affect recruiting. More recently, the only policy guidance for those who set enlistment incentives has come from analyses based on nonexperimental data. These analyses have employed widely recognized statistical estimators and, in many instances, have produced findings that seem both plausible and precise. Unfortunately, the statistical estimators used in these works have significant potential for bias when they are applied to nonexperimental data. This analysis describes several of the estimation problems that arise from using nonexperimental data to analyze the effects of enlistment incentives, discusses some of the econometric tools that researchers have used in their attempts to overcome these problems, and indicates the shortcomings of these tools. It also argues that the potential for estimation bias in these works is so severe that the Services should view the results from the recent analyses as inconclusive. Finally, the study proposes two experiments the Navy could undertake that would reveal important information about enlistment incentives, that would be low cost, and that would not hamper the Service’s ability to meet its accession goals.
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PROPAGATION ANOMALIES DURING PROJECT SANGUINE EXPERIMENTS
January 1, 1979
This paper reports on the investigation of extremely low frequency electromagnetic wave propagation. The investigation was done by measuring the amplitude of a continuous wave signal transmitted from the Sanguine site in North Carolina to receiving sites located in New York State, Labrador, and Iceland.
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Methods of Operations Research
June 1, 1974
In World War II, the phrase 'operations research' has come to describe the scientific, quantitative study of operations of war. This report is a first attempt to describe some of the methods which have proved most valuable in the study of warfare, and to indicate possible fruitful lines for further development, military and nonmilitary. The first chapter outlines the scope and methods of the subject. The second chapter discusses the relevant portions of the theory of probability, which is the field of mathematics most useful for this work. The rest of the chapters discuss techniques which have been particularly useful, with illustrations picked from work done in the recent war.
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