Joint Operations Superiority In The 21st Century: Analytic Support To The 1998 Defense Science Board

Abstract : Although the defense community has come to endorse "jointness" in military operations, views differ greatly on what operations should look like in the future. Joint Vision (JV) 2010 provides basic ideas on how people and technologies might best be used to shape Joint warfare in the future, but it is a vision document that is intended to serve as a conceptual template, not a blueprint. The Defense Science Board (DSB) was asked to help move things forward by focusing "on how new capabilities, operational concepts, and different force characteristics can be developed and integrated to underwrite Joint Vision 2010." This report describes part of RAND's analytical support of the DSB summer study, notably simulation experiments to help explore and assess Joint operational concepts. It builds on related work done by the authors for a previous DSB effort, Tactics and Technology for 21st Century Military Superiority In this year's effort, we not only drew on outcomes of such previous DSB studies, but also included new discussions with warfighters and planners in the Joint warfare community, and interactions with DSB members, to define a range of operational concepts for the future. The strengths and weaknesses of these concepts were explored using man-in-the-loop, high-resolution, stochastic constructive simulation in the context of a single basic scenario with a number of variations. Our intention in this detailed work was to; (1) provide insights and inputs for a broader, exploratory RAND analysis for the DSB, (2) increase dialogue among conceptualizers, users, and developers, and (3) suggest ideas that would indeed help the DSB take IV 2010 to the next step. An additional objective made clear by the summer study's leadership from the outset was to illustrate the kinds of analysis needed to assess new concepts.