Research for M&S

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Gaming and Shared Situation Awareness
November 1, 2000
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is interested in exploring key factors that affect how teams, particularly distributed teams, develop what is called shared situational awareness (SSA) in an operational environment. The DARPA Program Manager for the Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment program asked CNA to address these issues, with subcontracting support from ThoughtLink Incorporated. The focus of the project was to demonstrate how wargaming could be used as a testbed for conducting experiments to explore these key factors in team SSA. The approach centers on the use of a simplified, though not quite abstract, game that allows us to tailor its design and mode of play to focus on the specific research items of interest. In the case of SSA, we designed the game so that the bulk of the operational task faced by the players lies precisely in building a shared picture -their SSA-of their operating area. This approach removes much of the potential confounding between SSA and game-playing skill, a problem that can be associated with measuring a team's performance in a game primarily by measuring its success in performing a specific operational game task (such as winning the game). This paper summarizes our survey of SA and SSA research, and describes the game we used as our testbed, and outlines our experiment and its results. We conclude by discussing what we learned and speculating on where our research could lead.
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Defining and Measuring Shared Situational Awareness
November 1, 2000
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is interested in exploring key factors that affect how teams, particularly distributed teams, develop what is called shared situational awareness in an operational environment. The DARPA Program Manager for the Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment program asked CNA to address these issues, with subcontracting support from ThoughtLink Incorporated. The focus of the project was to demonstrate how wargaming could be used as a testbed for conducting experiments to explore these key factors in shared situational awareness. The concept of "shared situational awareness" which underlies some recent ideas about the organization of military staffs, is elusive and ill-defined, and does not lend itself easily to traditional scientific evaluation. Nevertheless, this paper composes a systematic definition and develops objective approaches to studying the process by which "shared situational awareness" (SSA) arises.
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Ground Combat Study : Summary of Analysis
October 1, 2000
In the USMC Ground Combat Study we are focused on small unit (squad and fire team) size and organization. Our goal is to use an analysis of historical changes in squads together with an analytic tool to provide the Marine Corps with an assessment of the relevance of these units on the future battlefield. Using CNA-initiated funding, we plan to demonstrate the utility of analyses in one of the USMC's core warfighting areas. We also plan for this study to be the first in our program of research into ground combat and, at a more general level, MAGTF operations,
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A Concise User's Guide to ISAAC-FL: ISAAC's Mission-Fitness Landscape Mapper Program
September 1, 1997
ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat) is a simple multiagent-based 'toy model' of land combat design to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional top-down, reductionist approach, and represents a first step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battlefield. This model was developed as part of a recently completed project, sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, that assessed the general applicability of 'complex systems theory.' The focus of this brief is a stand-alone Mission-Fitness Landscape Mapper that uses the core engine to 'map-out' the behavior over a user-defined d-dimensional slice of ISAAC's total N-dimensional phase-space.
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Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat (ISAAC): An Artificial - Life Approach to Land Warfare
August 1, 1997
This study is a follow-on effort to a recently completed project, sponsored by the Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, that assessed the general applicability of the new sciences to land warfare. 'New Sciences' is a catch-all phrase that refers to the tools and methodologies used in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems theory to study physical systems that exhibit a 'complicated dynamics.' CNA is currently developing a multiagent-based simulation of notional combat called ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat), a preliminary version of which is described in this report. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional top-down, or reductionist approach.
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Understanding Aircraft Readiness: An Empirical Approach
March 1, 1997
In the wake of a changing defense climate, the Navy is continuing to find ways to adjust to its smaller size while maintaining its ability to respond when required. An important part of strategy is to monitor readiness during the downsizing process. The first step toward managing readiness is to understand what readiness is and why it changes over time or among units. This paper contributes to the further understanding of readiness by identifying the relationship between standard readiness measures and their determinants for Navy fighter, attack, and fighter/attack aircraft. The analysis is an extension of our earlier work on explaining the readiness of surface combatants. Our objective was to build a comprehensive database of navy fighter and attack units over time and identify readiness trends and relationships between readiness determinants and readiness measures where they exist.
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Initial Assessment of the Air Combat Environment Test and Evaluation Facility To Support Operational Test and Evaluation Facility To Support Operational Test and Evaluation: Paper and Presentation Slides for International T&E Workshop--
November 1, 1996
This paper briefly describes the Navy's Operational Test and Evaluation Force's (OPTEVFOR's) assessment regarding the suitability of selected laboratories at the Air Combat Environment Test and Evaluation Facility (ACETEF) to support the operational test and evaluation of electronic warfare systems - Radar Warning Receivers (RWR) and, in particular, the Navy's next-generation RWR, the AN/ALR-67(V)3.
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Avoiding A Hollow Force: An Examination of Navy Readiness
April 1, 1996
Since 1989, the Navy has decommissioned 165 ships, seen its endstrength fall by nearly a quarter, and had its budget reduced by $38 billion -- a net reduction of 32 percent. These cuts have raised fears that the Navy may once again be on the verge of a hollow force. Our review of the readiness literature suggests that hollowness is a condition that keeps ships from living up to their design potential. It is the general state that persists whenever maintenance problems dominate a force; when poor quality sailors seem the rule rather than the exception; and when meaningful training is both scarce and questionable. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Navy experienced all of these problems and more. This paper summarizes the stages of our work on this issue and discusses the insights and key findings we have made along the way.
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