17 International Symposium on Military Operational Research

28 August – 1 September 2000, Eynsham Hall, Oxford, U.K.

It is with great pleasure that I introduce the 17 ISMOR Professor Ronnie Shephard Memorial Lecture of Prof Reiner Huber, Universitat der Bundeswehr Munchen. Prof Huber is a military operations analyst of long-standing. He is a familiar figure to military researchers in the United States and Canada as well as in his own country of Germany, and the NATO nations. He has participated in MORS special meetings, INFORMS (and its predecessor, ORSA) programs, and is a member of the Cornwallis Group planning body as well as a speaker at Cornwallis meetings at the Pearson Centre, Nova Scotia. Although Prof Huber is formally retiring (he refers to it as ‘semi-retirement) from the Munich military university, he will continue to play a significant role in military analysis for his own nation, NATO, and the US, as well as continue to teach Systems and Decision Theory and Systems Modeling at the university (he still has four PhD students and is the first reader of their dissertation).

For those who are not fully aware of the International Symposia on Military Operational Research or its founder Ronnie Shephard, Prof Huber’s talk at the most recent symposium will be an education.

For those of you involved with computer models of combat and other military functions, and, more particularly, verification, validation and accreditation, Prof Huber’s remarks should be, at a minimum, interesting. They may be more than interesting — they may be provocative, they may be exciting, they may be illuminating. Perhaps they may even be cause for exchanges and discussion in these pages, something lacking from recent issues of the PHALANX. With the hope of stimulating that exchange I pose a question to readers: Is Prof Huber correct in raising the issue of ‘blessed’ models? Another question: Given the difficulties now being encountered in the validation phase, will accreditation become the dominate feature, thus possibly leading to ‘blessed’ models?

As pointed out elsewhere in this issue of PHALANX, Prof Huber is the first presenter of the Shephard Memorial Lectures to come from the continent of Europe. He thus is the harbinger of things to come in future symposia. As Prof Huber tells us, the ISMOR series are the only truly international opportunities for military operations analysts to share approaches to military analysis and expose new ideas to the judgement of their peers.

Gene Visco, FS

Ronnie Shephard Memorial Address

on the occasion of

17 International Symposium on Military Operational Research

28 August – 1 September 2000, Eynsham Hall, Oxford, U.K.

Reiner K. Huber

Institute of Applied Systems Science and Operations Research

Department of Informatics

University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich

Neubiberg, Germany

Dear Mr Chairman, Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I feel greatly honored to present the 6^th address in memory of Professor Ronnie Shephard, an outstanding Operational Researcher in the very sense of the word, a meritorious member of the international community of military OR practitioners that he played no small part in bringing about, an unforgettable colleague and friend of many years, and not to forget the accomplished magician whose tricks many of us have enjoyed on various occasions.

The first time I met Ronnie was in the mid-sixties in West Byfleet during a meeting that I attended as a member of a German delegation visiting the Defence Operational Analysis Establishment (DOAE) where he was superintendent of land operations analysis. However, there was not much interaction that I remember, he ¾ even though looking rather boyish ¾ being an OR veteran of some 25 years at that time, and I a fairly junior air operations analyst with ORG, the Operations Research Group of IABG, Germany’s principal military operations research institution, that I had joined shortly after its founding in 1963, following five years of college in Munich and Austin, Texas, and a three year tour of duty as a logistics officer with the German Air Force.

However, it was only two years after he had moved to Shrivenham as Professor of Operational Research at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS), when he chaired the NATO-APOR-conference on “Field Trials and Acquisition of Tactical Operational Data“ in 1971 in Brussels, that I really met Ronnie. Eager to learn, but not having submitted to present a paper myself, Ronnie put me and several others, who he thought had come to enjoy his symposium from a higher vantage point, to work by assigning duties as session chairmen and rapporteurs. In doing so he asked us to tell him after the meeting what criteria he had chosen in making the assignments. I should point out that I was given the privilege of chairing a session on chemical weapons trials, a subject that I was utterly unfamiliar with. As it turned out, and none of us did guess, unfamiliarity with the session topic was Ronnie‘s primary selection criterion, followed by age not having matured to a degree that chairing a session would be considered routine business. He felt that this was an efficient procedure for both, assuring the quality of chairmanships because it made chairpersons put in extra effort to familiarize themselves a priori with the papers presented in their sessions, and giving junior and mid-career analysts an opportunity to exercise their skills in facilitating a debate among peers. I was rather impressed by this subtle motivational strategy of his that, as I later found out on many an occasion, characterized a man who left little to chance and was highly dedicated to those willing to learn.

I was impressed even more when, following my return from the conference, I skimmed through Alfred Hausrath’s then newly published book Venture Simulation in War, Business, and Politics and discovered that Ronnie Shephard had been an Army OR scholar ever since his graduation from Queen’s College Cambridge in 1943 and later became one of the prime movers in the development of analytical war gaming, or rather using war gaming for analytical purposes. Heading the Operational Research Group at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead, he had initiated work on the tactical level RARDE game as early as 1954, the year I began college. I should point out that the first German research war game FORKS (Forschungskriegsspiel) developed in the late sixties by IABG’s Land Operations Research Group was modeled after the RARDE game. FORKS eventually became the computer-assisted COFORKS a modified version of which was later incorporated in the air/land war gaming system OPS (OR-Planspielsystem), the first in a series of war gaming and interactive combat simulation systems developed over the years at IABG’s war gaming center. Thus, Ronnie Shephard may well be considered a forefather of military analytical gaming and simulation in Germany.

Thereafter, Ronnie and I ran into each other rather regularly at the biannual meetings of the NATO Advisory Panel on Operational Research (APOR) to which he had been appointed in early 1971 and I one year later. APOR was made up of some 10 OR scholars tasked to advise the NATO Assistant Secretary General for Scientific Affairs (at that time Gunnar Randers of Norway) in spreading the gospel of operational research among Alliance members by supporting the organization of international conferences and symposia, and awarding fellowships for OR scientists to study or pursue research for a period in another NATO country. Other members in the period of our joint tenure were Joe Engel (US), then APOR’s chairman and known in the community for his analysis of the battle of Iwo Jima showing that force attrition in that battle closely followed the Lanchester square law, Willem Bakker (NL), K.C. Bowen (UK), Antonio Corso (Italy), Roger Cruon (France), Halim Dogrusoz (Turkey), John Gratwick (Canada), Andreas Mortensen (Norway), and Bülent Bayraktar (Scientific Affairs Division) – names that some of the older members of this gathering undoubtedly do remember. Searching recently through my files I found a photo of the group taken at the 1972 spring meeting in Ankara. I remember that the photo session was postponed several times because we were waiting for Roger Cruon who was late because of having been held up in an Istanbul jail on suspicion of spying. Being a renowned birdwatcher, Roger had been caught by police near Istanbul on a Bosporus hill hiding among bushes, wearing camouflage gear, and aiming the telephoto lens of his camera at a flock of migrating birds on their way North - unaware of a nearby facility full of antennas and the warning signs on its fence declaring it a military installation that was not to be photographed.

It was when Ronnie left the APOR that a new Secretary for Scientific Affairs, Nimet Özdas of Turkey, was installed who initiated a review of all panels by the Science Committee. Under the influence of the German representative in the Science Committee, Eduard Pestel, who previously had worked on the World Modeling project of the Club of Rome, the proposal was made to replace APOR by a “Systems Dynamics Panel”. Rather than widening the terms of reference to deal with large scale systems as intended by Prof Özdas, this would have actually narrowed them to but one methodological approach which the members of APOR considered to be covered quite well by operational science and OR. As a compromise, APOR was given the name “Special Programme Panel on Systems Science” (SPOSS) in late 1972 while its program remained virtually unchanged.

One of the first SPOSS-conferences was organized in 1974 by myself, with Lynn Jones of RARDE and Egil Reine of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE) as co-directors, on the subject of “Modelling Land Battle Systems for Military Planning”. Succeeding Joe Engel, I was the chairmen of SPOSS at the time. Shortly before, I had been promoted to head IABG’s Military Systems Analysis Division responsible for combat modeling and analysis projects of all three services as well as for the newly established war gaming center. My motives in having this first international meeting on land operational research take place in Ottobrunn were not altogether altruistic. Rather, having been an air war analyst until recently, I needed to find out quickly about the state-of-the-art of land war modeling, and so did most of the analysts of the Land Systems Group that was the youngest of the three service analysis groups at IABG. Besides, I had an opportunity to pay Ronnie back for ambushing me into the session chairmanship three years before. However, since I had my chairpersons contribute a written assessment on their sessions to be included in the proceedings, I did not want to take any risks and applied exactly the opposite of Ronnie’s primary selection criterion, namely proven familiarity with the subject. Besides, there was no point in following his criterion because there was hardly a topical area addressed at that conference that Ronnie was not familiar with. Also, I should not forget to point out that David Faddy, the Chairman of this 17 ISMOR, presented a paper at the SPOSS-conference reviewing the family of land battle models used at DOAE in the Seventies.

Re-reading Ronnie’s working group report the other day, I noticed using double “ll” was still his way of spelling “modelling” then. Of course, the years of his lengthy sojourns in the US that gave rise to the odd occasion when he would use the single “l”, as Peter Haysman has observed in his address during the commemorative ceremony at St. Andrews Church in 1995, were still a long time away. And since it was the time when ready-to-be-printed typewritten manuscripts had to be submitted for the production of proceedings, there was not much that the New York publisher could do about it. However, he absolutely refused to use British spelling where he was in control, like on the cover of the book and on the reverse side of the title page where the official name of the conference was listed. I must admit that I did not put up a fight for the double “ll” which had nothing to do with the cultural roots I grew when going to school in Texas. Rather, I saved my efforts to convince the publisher that the title “Military Strategy” that he had proposed for sake of better marketing the proceedings was quite misleading. After a lengthy exchange of letters we compromised for “Military Strategy and Tactics” and, in smaller print, the subtitle “Computer Modeling of Land War Problems”. That is when I found out that publishers are convinced that most people go through the same routine when buying a book as they do when choosing a mate. If they like what they chose, they are lucky. If they don’t, its a done deal.

In the final observation of his working group report Ronnie concluded “..we must stress that we should be very concerned where emphasis on low-level modelling is reduced. It seems to us that this is a level at which it is possible to get good input data most easily (and consequently produce good output data) and therefore is an area that requires much attention in the future”. It should be added that it also is a level at which model hypotheses are to be verified most easily. Nevertheless, there is a long tradition among men of science, reaching back to ancient times, not to bother about verification. For example, Aristotele (384-322 B.C.) maintained that women have fewer teeth than men. “Although he was married twice, it never occurred to him to verify his statement by examining his wives’ mouths” (Bertrand Russel (1952): Impact of Science on Society). An example to the contrary is Ronnie who always took great care in trying to confirm the relevance of models to reality. For instance, in a concise and superbly written paper published by RMCS in 1974 he did show that his model for “Assessing the Relative Morale Effects of Shells and Warheads of Different Sizes” was in agreement with data from an analysis of bombardments carried out during World War II.

Following up the 1974 working group conclusions, Ronnie organized one of the few classified SPOSS-conferences in the following year (1975) on “Field Trials and Exercises as Sources of Input Data for Military Systems Analysis”. The proceedings were published by RMCS and are kept in the NATO archives which are in the process of being opened up. I was told, however, that by now the respective review of documents has only reached 1965 so far.

Some time after I had left SPOSS in 1976, the Science Committee’s mandate was widened to cover scientific and environmental affairs. At the same time the Committee decided to terminate supporting Systems Science and OR because it felt that the discipline had sufficiently matured and spread its gospel, and military applications should now fall within the realms of other more endowed NATO divisions and directorates concerned with armaments and defense research. However, the terms of reference of NATO’s Defence Research Group and its Panel 7 (on Defence Applications of Operational Research) focussed on addressing specific, and mostly classified, problems facing NATO militaries through collaborative analysis and research rather than providing forums for military systems scientists and operations researchers to meet for exchanging ideas on new methodological advances and sharing analysis experience as APOR and SPOSS had done by supporting open conferences.¹

And here is where Ronnie comes back into the picture. Having experienced their benefits, Ronnie was very concerned about the disappearance of the NATO forums for gathering practitioners of military OR/SA. NATO records indicate that he was in correspondence with Science Programme Directors on Operational Research up to 1979 when he presumably became convinced that NATO’s decision was irreversible and a new forum had to be created. And that’s exactly what he did by organizing, in 1984, the first International Symposium on Military Operations Research (ISMOR), and another one every year since until he passed away in 1995. In fact, other than the military applications sessions (MAS) at the biannual ORSA (now INFORMS) conferences in the US, ISMOR has become the only truly international meeting open to practitioners of military OR/SA from everywhere. The traditionally strong US participation suggests that ISMOR has something to offer that MAS and the meetings of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS), the latter being restricted largely to US participants only, seem to lack. I suggest that the continental Europeans would be well advised to take more advantage of ISMOR and increase their support and participation. In fact, to me ISMOR looks like the perfect focal point for the formation of a coherent international community providing a professional home, so to speak, for practitioners of military OR/SA, in particular for those from smaller countries where the few analysts come from but one or two institutions, thus being deprived of regular peer review and the benefits of learning from the experience of others, and running the risk of having to invent the wheel all over again.

I also remember Ronnie as keen observer of developments and a strong advocate of professionalism in operational analysis. And, to use Peter Haysman’s words, he did not regard as being of much value for analysis “computer models of mind numbing impenetrability“. Most often, as the late Wilbur Payne, one of the foremost military systems analysts of his time who had served as Deputy Under Secretary of the (US) Army for Operations Research, has observed, even an experienced analyst must devise his own ad hoc analytical model to help him understand and interpret the results of large-scale computer simulation experiments. Besides, nonmonotonicities (structural variance) are quite common in military simulations. But they are hardly ever seen because the more complex models are seldom run repetitively in ways that would reveal them.¹. Nevertheless, large-scale high-resolution models are around and being used for analysis and in staff training simulations. However, having been developed for studying specific problems, most of them are not easily adapted to fit a new problem or inter-operate with other models, a problem that was recognized by the US Army in the late Seventies and to be addressed by the Army Model Improvement Progam (AMIP). I remember the intense debate between US and British analysts when the project was presented at the DRG-symposium on “Modeling and Analysis of Defense Processes” that I had organized in 1982 (see footnote 1). Having not been a smashing success, it seems that AMIP’s objectives have now found their way into DOD’s VV&A project tasked to develop standards and procedures for verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A) of models and simulations in the military domain.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ronnie would be highly critical of some of the potential implications of the VV&A process for analysis because it may someday become a standard operating procedure for model development in the defense arena. Construed by the DOD’s Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) founded in 1981, it may well bring about the technical standards required for distributed model simulations for training military forces on a global scale including interoperation with appropriate models of allies. However, I frown, and so would Ronnie, on the idea of being forced to only use, for analysis purposes or in decision support studies, “accredited” or “certified” models that I may not be intimately familiar with and which are, like all military combat models, beyond rigorous validation because of insufficient and mostly irrelevant empirical evidence. But some analysts may not, and users may accept without debate their interpretation of results simply because of having been generated with a certified model. However, being intimately familiar with the model used for analysis and its underlying assumptions is an indispensable prerequisite for an appropriate interpretation of its numerical results.

Soon after he wrote a supportive report on VV&A in 1992, Paul Davis of RAND tuned out of the subject because “I expected that it would become a monster – with DOD blessing certain models and causing trouble for anyone using anything other than the blessed models. I also feared that there would be some useless wheel spinning”. Davis adds that it is studies that should be validated/accredited, not models. In his invited presentation at the recent MORS symposium Seth Bonder of Vector Research, Incorporated (VRI), a former president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) as well as MORS, concurs: “Remember, it’s the analyst not the model that produces important and useful results. Improve the former before the latter!” That’s what the UK Fellowship of OR seems to be all about for which Ronnie was pleading wholeheartedly back in the Seventies.

Let me close with a quote and a question. The quote is from the essay “Into the Wind” by Lord Reith (1949). Aimed at the British civil service, it seems applicable to bureaucracies in general, including the military ones: “By the time the civil service has finished drafting a document to give effect to a principle, there may be little of the principle left”. The question is whether it isn’t ironic that shortly after history has demonstrated to us the vanity of “blessed scenarios” that we had to use in our analyses during the Cold War, old mistakes are being repeated, albeit at a higher level of procedural sophistication but with potentially more detrimental results for the future of OR/SA, by introducing the notion of “blessed models”? But history also tells us that threats may eventually run out of steam and go away.

Thank you.

1It was with some degree of reluctance that Panel 7 of NATO’s Defence Research Group agreed to my proposal of organizing the 1982 Brussels symposium on “Modeling and Analysis of Defense Processes” for an international state-of-the-art review of defense systems analysis approaches (see also Reiner K. Huber: Systems Analysis and Modeling in Defense – Development, Trends, and Issues. New York 1984, Plenum Press). To my knowlege, it was almost 12 years later, in January 1995 in the Hague, that Panel 7 supported another symposium of this kind, organized by David Faddy, M.J. van de Scheur, and D.J.D. Wijnmalen on “Coping with Uncertainty in Defence Decision Making”.