As we move
forward into a new century and a new millennium, I envision a busy future for
military operations research, and a future that will demand a significant
increase in the number of military OR scientists. Lest I be perceived to be
making only the obligatory first remarks of a new MAS President, I would like to
take this opportunity, my first President’s message, to explain my reasoning.
I realize that
some outside our profession have questioned the need for OR in the future,
arguing primarily from an academic perspective, that OR has been subsumed by a
variety of other disciplines.
Specifically, with regard to military OR, some critics have argued in
effect that all the great problems have been solved, the Cold War is over, the
big Soviet threat has disappeared, and military OR is destined to become an
artifact of the 20th Century.
With regard to
the demise of the Soviet Union and the post-cold war era, in testimony before
the House National Security Committee [now House Armed Services Committee] on
12 February 1998, R. James Woolsey, former CIA Director, stated:
“People such as Saddam
Hussein and Kim Jong II are far more unpredictable and irrational
than the Soviet leaders ever were. It
is dangerous, I believe, to assume that military developments and deployments
in regimes such as these are going to follow some relatively predictable
pattern. I said on a number of
occasions, and my staff, when I was DCI, used to wince when they heard it
because they heard it so often, that we were in a situation similar to that of
having struggled with a dragon for 45 years and killed him and now finding
ourselves in a jungle full of a lot of poisonous snakes. That, in many ways, the snakes were much
harder to keep track of than the dragon ever was.”
If we
“translate” Woolsey’s statement into operations research terminology, we could
say that the post-cold war era has more unknowns, more complexity, and more
uncertainty. Such an environment is
fertile ground for operations researchers.
Additionally, just as warfare during the industrial 20th Century was
vastly different from warfare in the agrarian 19th Century, we must conclude
that warfare in the 21st Century will differ dramatically from what we have
seen. Things we read about as children
in comic books or watched on Saturday serials at the movies in the adventures
of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, such as ray guns [now called lasers] or robots,
are now realities not science fiction.
This new age we are entering, referred to by some as the Information Age
or the Age of the Computer, will feature warfare with these heretofore science
fiction weapons. Empirical models for future warfare have yet to be developed,
and their development will fall squarely on the military OR community. Compounding the complexity presented by such
new weaponry is the increasing proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD) developed in the 20th Century.
Pandora is out of the box. Unpredictable
and irrational regimes referred to by Woolsey have WMD. The combination of new weaponry mixed with
WMD on nonlinear battlefields in the hands of asymmetric enemies poses
considerable analytic challenges. We
are on the verge of the third wave of military OR.
Thus, I believe
we are about to see a resurgence in our profession; a new awakening. We have a busy future ahead of us, and I
know we are capable of meeting the challenges that lie ahead. I am proud to serve as MAS President, and I
am proud of our profession.
Dr Bruce
Fowler, outgoing Military Applications Society President, leaves a very big
pair of shoes to fill, and I do not take the awesome task of filling them
lightly. Bruce passed the baton to me
in November in San Antonio at the joint national meetings of INFORMS and MAS,
and I am most honored to serve as MAS President for the next two years. I have been very fortunate the last two
years to serve as Vice President under Bruce’s stalwart leadership, and I will
continue to work toward the vision Bruce set forth for MAS in the 21st Century.
I am very
privileged to have two exceptional MAS Officers join me for the next two years
in transitioning MAS into the next century.
Dr Philipp Djang [Army Research Laboratory], was elected to the position
of MAS Vice President and President Elect, and Dr Richard Deckro [Air
Force Institute of Technology] was elected to the position of MAS Secretary and
Treasurer. I am additionally privileged to have two new MAS Council Members
joining MAS’ Executive Council. Dr Alfred Brandstein [Marine Corps Combat Development Command]
and Dr James Taylor [Naval Postgraduate School] were elected to MAS
Council, and both will serve four-year terms. Dr Brandstein and Dr Taylor join
Dr Gregory Parnell, FS [United States Military Academy] and Dr Ralph
Toms [SRI International] who have been diligently serving MAS as Council
Members for the past two years.