2022 Campaign Analysis Workshop

As circumstances change and new threats emerge, the Department of Defense is required to evaluate and refine capability development, force sizing, emerging warfighting concepts, and innovative approaches to these new environments.  What began in 2019 as the 2030 Joint Force Operating Scenario (JFOS) has since become a recurring process run by the Services to develop a Concept of Operations (CONOPS) paired with a given scenario influenced by Defense Planning Scenarios (DPS).  These provide the level of detail and context needed to conduct wargaming, modeling and simulation, and other analysis to inform senior military leaders, Program Objective Memorandums (POMs), force structure decisions, concept development, and follow-on studies.  To create a JFOS, the Joint Working Group (JWG), consisting of planners and analysts from the six Services, intelligence community, and several supporting commands and organizations, takes existing scenarios and CONOPS, updated threat information, and future capabilities and capacities and leverages them to develop a robust scenario and associated CONOPS set in a future time frame.  The JFOS development process is guided along the way by a panel of two-star Flag and General Officers and SES equivalents representing all Services and supporting organizations.  The scenario and CONOPS are approved at the various stages of development by a separate three-star level committee with a voting member representing each Service.

The JFOS process is now in its third iteration.  It has continued to gain support among the various Service analytical organizations and myriad other stakeholders.  The completed JFOS products have been used as the basis for analysis across the DoD including: the Chairman’s Global Integrated Wargame 21, inter-Service collaborative simulation databases, Service specific wargames and analysis, mission level modelling, and campaign modeling excursions.

Combat Forces Assessment Model (CFAM) is a mixed-integer linear program that pits a set of aircraft and weapon loads against “enemy” targets at the campaign level. The goal of the model is to destroy the targets as quickly as possible, subject to several constraints, such as the number of aircraft, how far they can fly on a full load of fuel, how fast they fly, their susceptibility to being shot down, how effective a given weapons loadout is against the targets, the aircraft beddown plan (basing) in relation to target locations, the quantity of weapons of each type, and many, many other constraints. As a campaign-level model, CFAM takes inputs from other models such as STORM (target data), TAMS (attrition data), Brawler (attrition and effects data), and the Air Force Research Labs WEAPS office (for weapons effects). Originally formulated in the 1990’s, CFAM has undergone dozens of major updates, and now CFAM 3.1 is available for users to install and run on Windows 10 machines or a Linux cluster (High-Performance Computer). This CFAM 3.1 tutorial provides a broad overview of the latest enhancements to the model and presents to the viewers the modeling techniques in place to add increased levels of resolution for quickly measuring the value of change to single or multiple parameters.

The Joint Integrated Contingency Model (JICM) is a theater campaign model currently used by the Center for Army Analysis for campaign-level assessment of military plans to include warfighting, strategic mobility, and logistics. JICM is joint by design to provide a balanced representation of service capabilities and can model multiple theaters. JICM is a deterministic model that can yield quick estimates of expected outcomes. This JICM tutorial provides an overview of the theater campaign analysis methodology and an overview of the inputs, outputs, strengths, and limitations of JICM. It describes the model implementation with several screenshots showing exactly what a JICM analyst sees when running the model.

Campaign analysis has been criticized for being slow, rigid in strategy, and restricted to a small set of experts to access. We are not proposing that all of these criticisms will go away with the introduction of BEAM, but these criticisms are some of the motivations for BEAM. What if campaign analysis could give an answer faster at a lower resolution? What if the interaction between the true SME’s who need to inform the scenario and the analysts who are building it could be sped up? What if strategy changes could be explored quickly? What if campaign analysis could be used across a broader spectrum of analysis, instead of in specialized shops? BEAM provides an opportunity to break the paradigm of how campaign analysis has been used across the analytic landscape.

During this tutorial we will illustrate BEAM in a live demonstration. We will walk through the tool showing the level of aggregation (high) that allows for this kind of broad but flexible analysis. We will demonstrate how to add regions and assets, define strategy, and explore results. We will show how to perform analysis with BEAM and what kind of insights one would hope to derive. We will discuss what kinds of problems BEAM is best suited to address and which ones it is not. Finally, we will discuss where we are in the process of BEAM development and which features are planned for future versions.

Campaign analysis of ground operations across different theaters and timeframes requires a model that produces consistent and reproducible combat samples for use in theater-level models to adjudicate campaign outcomes. The Center for Army Analysis (CAA) has put forth considerable effort to capture the most significant, tangible effects of ground operations in the combat samples for theater-level models produced by the Combat Sample Generator (COSAGE). The combat samples produced by CAA are for use in all Attrition Calibration (ATCAL)-based, theater-level models (e.g., Joint Integrated Contingency Model (JICM) and Synthetic Theater Operations Research Model (STORM)). This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of COSAGE, summarizes CAA’s recent efforts to enhance the quality of the COSAGE combat samples, and explains the process to request the production of combat samples.

Simulation models are integral to modern scientific research, national defense, industry and manufacturing, and in public policy debates. These models tend to be extremely complex, often with thousands of factors and many sources of uncertainty. To understand the impact of these factors and their interactions on model outcomes requires efficient, high-dimensional design of experiments. Unfortunately, all too often, many large-scale simulation models continue to be explored in ad hoc ways. This suggests that more simulation researchers and practitioners need to be aware of the power of designed experiments in order to get the most from their simulation studies. Data farming is a descriptive metaphor that captures the notion of generating data purposefully to maximize the information “yield” from simulation models. Large-scale designed experiments let us grow the simulation output efficiently and effectively. We can explore large input spaces, uncover interesting features of complex simulation response surfaces, and explicitly identify cause-and-effect relationships. In this tutorial, we demonstrate the basic concepts important for designing and conducting simulation experiments, and also provide our perspective on the unique challenges and opportunities associated with applying to complex campaign models.

This tutorial will begin with a bit of history of games, game theory, and artificial intelligence to provide context on the relationships between them. It will then provide a game theory primer for gamers to highlight elements of game theory that affect game outcomes and should be considered in game design. It will then turn to the role of games in advancing artificial intelligence and the implications of game theory for classes of problems where artificial intelligence will out perform human intelligence, and classes of problems where that is highly unlikely.

Description: Campaign analysis is a diverse field of study pulling from modeling and simulation, statistics, analysis, military operations and strategy, international relations, and more. Demand for these skills have returned in the era of near-peer competition. The community is now tasked with training the next generation of analyst while facing a shortage of experienced professionals and a competitive business environment for technical skills. Many organizations in the community have responded by hiring general technical talent and training them on the job. This working group will examine the state of the campaign analysis workforce and provide recommended curriculum for educating the next generation of analyst. This curriculum is intended to advise MORS and other organizations in the development of short courses.

Description: This working group will examine the history of campaign analysis and identify, generalize, and propose executable best practices based on past successes and failures. The focus of these discussions will be to assign root causes to high-level successes and failures throughout campaign analysis history and use that information to establish repeatable, generalized processes and practices that can be applied to future challenges in the campaign analysis community. The goal of this working group will be for these discussions to inform a deliverable (produce by the working group) that consolidates these best-practices for the reference of the overall community. This working group will have briefings on the history of various tools, facilitated case-studies on critical points in tool development, and panels across services to identify current and future needs in campaign analysis.

Description: This working group will solicit, discuss and debate concepts regarding the future of campaign analysis. Several nascent developmental projects exist in the DOD enterprise that warrant attention and discussion to understand their perceptions of problems, gaps, and capabilities they are attempting to address and solve. This forum will allow for discussions about those good-faith efforts in order to highlight the issues being addressed. This group will be a combination of briefings of nascent and developmental models as well as invited panel session of government representatives. Potential questions to be addressed are what are the valid use cases of future tools; what questions will the tools need to answer; why do current capabilities fail to meet those goals; will these tools be developed collectively; how will V&V be conducted and managed?

Description: Campaign analysts will be tasked with representing and comparing the net synergistic effects of tactical operations spanning all of the domains over the course of an operational campaign. As a community, we are well-versed in representing effects within the kinetic domains; we seek to do better our representation of non-kinetic effects and their synergistic and compounding operational effects. This working group will examine some recent examples of integration of non-kinetic effects in campaign analysis, discuss some current inter-service efforts to develop new frameworks for examining the issue, and identify key areas in campaign analysis where we, as a community, see gaps in our representation of these effects.

Description: Entities across DoD and Industry have been applying principles of Digital Transformation in support of efficiently designing, delivering, operating, and sustaining new capabilities and products to meet the current and projected future needs defined in the National Defense Strategy. Campaign analyses will play a critical role in shaping future force structures. Leveraging digital sources will deliver an agile response to rapidly evolving threats and budgetary pressures.

This working group will identify the unmet needs of the customer; explore the benefits of improved data management, data sharing, and robust configuration control; identify processes to streamline Campaign Analyses; identify capabilities and the required workforce knowledge and experience to implement such changes; identify and prioritize improvements to leverage Digital Transformation products that meet the needs the campaign analysis community. Contents of this working group include discussions and briefings to understand current Digital Transformation efforts and tools or methods under development, including models, alternative approaches or techniques, database management, application of artificial intelligence and/or machine learning and other related topics.

Desired deliverables from this working group include a list of observations and recommendations for focus areas that maximize benefits. The working group will list a recommended set of techniques, tools, and methods associated with the Digital Transformation process that will advance and streamline campaign analyses.

Description: Wargaming provides a valuable approach to campaign analysis and is often preferred by policy and operators. The application of wargaming allows the investigation into more qualitative analysis and is better able to represent the strategic decision making in a conflict over constructive simulation. This working group will assess the current state of the art in running and analyzing wargames at the campaign level. The objective of this group will be to document the best practices and identify areas for improvement in the field.