Philosophical Dialogue and Military Decision Making

Abstract: The military establishment plays an important role in society, not only because it is pivotal in securing the state from external and internal threats but also because the conduct of soldiers affect the fortunes of the state both fiscally and morally. Early in their career, soldiers are trained to be irreproachable in their loyalty, unquestioning in their obedience and unthinking in their pursuit of military objective. This, however changes as they move up into command positions and are required to decide on objectives as well as give orders for others to obey. For many officers, this is usually a difficult transition to make even though Staff School training is supposed to enable them to make this transition. This paper is based on an attempt to introduce philosophical dialogue to student officers of a military academy to help them make this difficult transition. It discusses the use of philosophical dialogue in facilitating officers’ understanding of important issues in the military, including military decision making. It highlights the procedure, difficulties and dangers of facilitating philosophical dialogue between soldiers especially as it relates to the corporate unity and command structure of the military. The paper also reflects on the efficacy and desirability of involving soldiers in a dialogue process. Keywords: Decision making, Military training, MDMP (Military Decision Making Process), Philosophical Dialogue, Resumen: La institución militar y juega un papel importante en la sociedad, no sólo porque es una base crucial para la seguridad del estado frente a amenazas internas y externas sino porque la conducta de los soldados afecta al destino del estado tan física como moralmente. Al comienzo de sus carreras, los soldados son entrenados en el desarrollo de una lealtad indubitable, evitando el cuestionamiento y la crítica para incentivar el desarrollo de los objetivos militares. Esta situación cambia cuando asciende a posiciones superiores, donde se requiere que decidan sobre la consecución de ciertos objetivos y que den órdenes a otros. Para muchos oficiales, esto supone una difícil transición a pesar de que la escuela de oficiales se supone que los capacita para realizar esta transición. Este artículo pretende explicar cómo introducir el diálogo filosófico a los estudiantes que se preparan para ser oficiales en la academia militar, actividad que les ayudará a desenvolver esta complicada transición. El trabajo discute el uso del diálogo filosófico para facilitar a los oficiales la comprensión de los asuntos militares importantes, lo cual abarca la toma de decisión militar. Subrayará, el procedimiento, las dificultades y los peligros de facilitar un diálogo filosófico entre los soldados, particularmente cuando se dirige a la unidad militar y a la estructura de órdenes delejército. Además, esta investigación reflexiona sobre la eficacia y deseabilidad de incorporar a los soldados en un proceso dialógico. Palabras clave: Toma de decisión, entrenamiento militar, Proceso de toma de decisión militar (PTDM), diálogo filosófico

Strategic Resource Allocation: Selecting Vessels to Support Maritime Irregular Warfare

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.5711/1082598318321The US Navy is at a critical juncture in determining the types and numbers of ships it will acquire, retire, and sustain to support an evolving US military strategy. In addition to determining how many aircraft carriers, cruisers, amphibious assault craft, fighters, and helicopters it will need, the Navy must determine how it will confront maritime irregular warfare. Assuming an environment of resource scarcity, where new vessel acquisition to support maritime irregular warfare may be increasingly difficult or unlikely, we introduce a method for evaluating the capability and costs of candidate vessels that are in the current Department of Defense inventory, or widely available from the commercial sector to conduct such a mission. Our method combines wargaming with cost analysis to aid Navy leadership in developing maritime irregular warfare concepts of operation as well as resource allocation decisions.RAND CorporationAcquisition Research ProgramRAND CorporationAcquisition Research Progra

Challenges for Human, Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling

Today\u27s military focus has moved away from the force-on-force battlefield of the past century and into the domain of irregular warfare and its companion security, stability, transition and reconstruction missions. With that change in focus has come a need to examine the operational environment from a wider perspective, one that includes the whole range of human experiences and circumstances. As the set of factors and list of players expands, the need for reliable modeling and simulation increases, if for no other reason than to help the human decision maker make sense of this expanded decision space. However, to do this, the models and simulations must take into account the whole of government whole of society and all those with an interest in region in question- allies, trade partners, adversaries, individuals, and networks of influence. The ideal solution would be to inject models from the human sciences into our kinetic simulations and declare success, but this is not possible. The different disciplines that comprise social and human sciences have different vocabularies and interpretations of events. They understand measurement, data, and models in diverse ways and their time scales vary from those we understand from working with kinetic models. The intent of this paper is to examine some of these differences and the challenges they present both technically and managerially

MODELLING & SIMULATION HYBRID WARFARE Researches, Models and Tools for Hybrid Warfare and Population Simulation

The Hybrid Warfare phenomena, which is the subject of the current research, has been framed by the work of Professor Agostino Bruzzone (University of Genoa) and Professor Erdal Cayirci (University of Stavanger), that in June 2016 created in order to inquiry the subject a dedicated Exploratory Team, which was endorsed by NATO Modelling & Simulation Group (a panel of the NATO Science & Technology organization) and established with the participation as well of the author. The author brought his personal contribution within the ET43 by introducing meaningful insights coming from the lecture of \u201cFight by the minutes: Time and the Art of War (1994)\u201d, written by Lieutenant Colonel US Army (Rtd.) Robert Leonhard; in such work, Leonhard extensively developed the concept that \u201cTime\u201d, rather than geometry of the battlefield and/or firepower, is the critical factor to tackle in military operations and by extension in Hybrid Warfare. The critical reflection about the time - both in its quantitative and qualitative dimension - in a hybrid confrontation it is addressed and studied inside SIMCJOH, a software built around challenges that imposes literally to \u201cFight by the minutes\u201d, echoing the core concept expressed in the eponymous work. Hybrid Warfare \u2013 which, by definition and purpose, aims to keep the military commitment of both aggressor and defender at the lowest - can gain enormous profit by employing a wide variety of non-military tools, turning them into a weapon, as in the case of the phenomena of \u201cweaponization of mass migrations\u201d, as it is examined in the \u201cDies Irae\u201d simulation architecture. Currently, since migration it is a very sensitive and divisive issue among the public opinions of many European countries, cynically leveraging on a humanitarian emergency caused by an exogenous, inducted migration, could result in a high level of political and social destabilization, which indeed favours the concurrent actions carried on by other hybrid tools. Other kind of disruption however, are already available in the arsenal of Hybrid Warfare, such cyber threats, information campaigns lead by troll factories for the diffusion of fake/altered news, etc. From this perspective the author examines how the TREX (Threat network simulation for REactive eXperience) simulator is able to offer insights about a hybrid scenario characterized by an intense level of social disruption, brought by cyber-attacks and systemic faking of news. Furthermore, the rising discipline of \u201cStrategic Engineering\u201d, as envisaged by Professor Agostino Bruzzone, when matched with the operational requirements to fulfil in order to counter Hybrid Threats, it brings another innovative, as much as powerful tool, into the professional luggage of the military and the civilian employed in Defence and Homeland security sectors. Hybrid is not the New War. What is new is brought by globalization paired with the transition to the information age and rising geopolitical tensions, which have put new emphasis on hybrid hostilities that manifest themselves in a contemporary way. Hybrid Warfare is a deliberate choice of an aggressor. While militarily weak nations can resort to it in order to re-balance the odds, instead military strong nations appreciate its inherent effectiveness coupled with the denial of direct responsibility, thus circumventing the rules of the International Community (IC). In order to be successful, Hybrid Warfare should consist of a highly coordinated, sapient mix of diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces (even criminal elements), cyber disruption etc. all in order to achieve effects across the entire DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. However, the owner of the strategy, i.e. the aggressor, by keeping the threshold of impunity as high as possible and decreasing the willingness of the defender, can maintain his Hybrid Warfare at a diplomatically feasible level; so the model of the capacity, willingness and threshold, as proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone and Gunneriusson (2016), remains critical to comprehend Hybrid Warfare. Its dynamicity is able to capture the evanescent, blurring line between Hybrid Warfare and Conventional Warfare. In such contest time is the critical factor: this because it is hard to foreseen for the aggressor how long he can keep up with such strategy without risking either the retaliation from the International Community or the depletion of resources across its own DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. Similar discourse affects the defender: if he isn\u2019t able to cope with Hybrid Threats (i.e. taking no action), time works against him; if he is, he can start to develop counter narrative and address physical countermeasures. However, this can lead, in the medium long period, to an unforeseen (both for the attacker and the defender) escalation into a large, conventional, armed conflict. The performance of operations that required more than kinetic effects drove the development of DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models and in turn this drive the development of Human Social Culture Behavior Modelling (HCSB), which should stand at the core of the Hybrid Warfare modelling and simulation efforts. Multi Layers models are fundamental to evaluate Strategies and Support Decisions: currently there are favourable conditions to implement models of Hybrid Warfare, such as Dies Irae, SIMCJOH and TREX, in order to further develop tools and war-games for studying new tactics, execute collective training and to support decisions making and analysis planning. The proposed approach is based on the idea to create a mosaic made by HLA interoperable simulators able to be combined as tiles to cover an extensive part of the Hybrid Warfare, giving the users an interactive and intuitive environment based on the \u201cModelling interoperable Simulation and Serious Game\u201d (MS2G) approach. From this point of view, the impressive capabilities achieved by IA-CGF in human behavior modeling to support population simulation as well as their native HLA structure, suggests to adopt them as core engine in this application field. However, it necessary to highlight that, when modelling DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT domains, the researcher has to be aware of the bias introduced by the fact that especially Political and Social \u201cscience\u201d are accompanied and built around value judgement. From this perspective, the models proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone, Guinnarson (2016) and by Balaban & Mileniczek (2018) are indeed a courageous tentative to import, into the domain of particularly poorly understood phenomena (social, politics, and to a lesser degree economics - Hartley, 2016), the mathematical and statistical instruments and the methodologies employed by the pure, hard sciences. Nevertheless, just using the instruments and the methodology of the hard sciences it is not enough to obtain the objectivity, and is such aspect the representations of Hybrid Warfare mechanics could meet their limit: this is posed by the fact that they use, as input for the equations that represents Hybrid Warfare, not physical data observed during a scientific experiment, but rather observation of the reality that assumes implicitly and explicitly a value judgment, which could lead to a biased output. Such value judgement it is subjective, and not objective like the mathematical and physical sciences; when this is not well understood and managed by the academic and the researcher, it can introduce distortions - which are unacceptable for the purpose of the Science - which could be used as well to enforce a narrative mainstream that contains a so called \u201ctruth\u201d, which lies inside the boundary of politics rather than Science. Those observations around subjectivity of social sciences vs objectivity of pure sciences, being nothing new, suggest however the need to examine the problem under a new perspective, less philosophical and more leaned toward the practical application. The suggestion that the author want make here is that the Verification and Validation process, in particular the methodology used by Professor Bruzzone in doing V&V for SIMCJOH (2016) and the one described in the Modelling & Simulation User Risk Methodology (MURM) developed by Pandolfini, Youngblood et all (2018), could be applied to evaluate if there is a bias and the extent of the it, or at least making clear the value judgment adopted in developing the DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models. Such V&V research is however outside the scope of the present work, even though it is an offspring of it, and for such reason the author would like to make further inquiries on this particular subject in the future. Then, the theoretical discourse around Hybrid Warfare has been completed addressing the need to establish a new discipline, Strategic Engineering, very much necessary because of the current a political and economic environment which allocates diminishing resources to Defense and Homeland Security (at least in Europe). However, Strategic Engineering can successfully address its challenges when coupled with the understanding and the management of the fourth dimension of military and hybrid operations, Time. For the reasons above, and as elaborated by Leonhard and extensively discussed in the present work, addressing the concern posed by Time dimension is necessary for the success of any military or Hybrid confrontation. The SIMCJOH project, examined under the above perspective, proved that the simulator has the ability to address the fourth dimension of military and non-military confrontation. In operations, Time is the most critical factor during execution, and this was successfully transferred inside the simulator; as such, SIMCJOH can be viewed as a training tool and as well a dynamic generator of events for the MEL/MIL execution during any exercise. In conclusion, SIMCJOH Project successfully faces new challenging aspects, allowed to study and develop new simulation models in order to support decision makers, Commanders and their Staff. Finally, the question posed by Leonhard in terms of recognition of the importance of time management of military operations - nowadays Hybrid Conflict - has not been answered yet; however, the author believes that Modelling and Simulation tools and techniques can represent the safe \u201ctank\u201d where innovative and advanced scientific solutions can be tested, exploiting the advantage of doing it in a synthetic environment

Beyond 2017: the Australian Defence Force and amphibious warfare

Overview: The delivery of Australia’s new amphibious warships, HMAS Canberra and Adelaide, is an important milestone in the ADF’s quest to develop a strategically relevant amphibious warfare capability. Australia’s position in the world makes the effort a strategic imperative, but the ADF still has a long way to go and many critical decisions ahead if it’s to develop an amphibious warfare capability that’s ready for future challenges. The resources committed to the effort and the associated opportunity costs have been and will be substantial, and the overall need for the capability must be weighed against other priorities, but if Australia’s going to do it, we should do it properly. The aim of the paper was to identify some of the key decisions to be made by ADF leaders over the next two years to ensure that Australia has an amphibious warfare capability that’s effective and relevant to future challenges and provide specific recommendations on the

Analysis of maritime support vessels and acquisition methods utilized to support maritime irregular warfare

MBA Professional ReportAs the U.S. military continuously aligns the appropriate platforms to conduct Maritime Irregular Warfare (MIW), Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has leased/chartered civilian ships to provide the appropriate vessels needed to support operations in Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines (OEF-P). The framework of this study showcases three specific vessels with their corresponding capabilities on cost per day basis. Our findings and analyses may aid commanders in determining the most appropriate vessel and cost-effective acquisition method to accomplish specific MIW missions in not only OEF-P, but also in other MIW environments. Based on the analysis and recommendations presented in this project, decision makers in this arena will have a mechanism from which to make a more informed decision regarding the acquisition of vessels supporting MIW. Decision makers will be able to evaluate various potential MIW scenarios; identify specific vessel capabilities to meet their operational requirements; and acquire vessels more cost-effectively based on total daily rate costs.http://archive.org/details/analysisofmariti109451051

The Hybrid Counterinsurgency Strategy: System Dynamics Employed to Develop a Behavioral Model of Joint Strategy

Since the recent focus on the Global War on Terror, both military and civilian theorists have begun to “relearn” the intricacies of counterinsurgency warfare. We face difficult challenges when confronting non-state actors that tend to attack in the time between conventional battles and the establishment of stable governments. This research compares and contrasts current counterinsurgency strategies (Hearts and Minds and Cost Benefit Theory) by applying System Dynamics to provide insight into the influences and emergent behavior patterns of counterinsurgency systems. The information gained from the development of the models and from their simulation behaviors is used to construct a System Dynamics model of a Hybrid Counterinsurgency Strategy that combines the influential elements and behaviors from each of the previous models to obtain a more comprehensive model of the counterinsurgency system. This process yields behavior patterns that suggest that security operations, critical during the short-term, are key to disrupting insurgent organizational mechanisms that strongly influence the population’s support for the host government and the coalition. The models also demonstrate the strength of the influence of information operations on the counterinsurgency system. Finally, the construction of the models and simulation behaviors propose that harvesting host nation capacity throughout the counterinsurgency is the most influential factor for maintaining long-term stability

Mao with Smart Phones and Internet? A Comparison of Classic Guerrilla Warfare with Fourth and Fifth Generation Warfare Using an Agent-Based Model for Simulation

Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) theory shares many characteristics of classical guerrilla warfare (CGW) theory in security studies literature. Proponents claim that 4GW is a revolution in war that overturns traditional measures of military power, while critics counter that 4GW is simply CGW in an updated context. Another group posits Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW), which adds additional information-age technologies and uses “any and all means,” (military and extra-military) to attack both the enemy’s will and capability to resist. The irregular subset of 5GW strategies appear to be an extension of 4GW with the addition of advanced information-age technologies: mobile phones and internet spreading propaganda instantly to friendly groups as well as national and trans-national enemies, while unconventional tactics such as suicide bombings and terrorist actions attempt to drain the will of opponents to continue the fight. The CGW and 4/5GW strategies are modeled in an agent-based simulation to evaluate similarities and differences in speed to victory, territory controlled, and the identity of the winning side. Emergent behaviors are compared with historical data. Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) as conceptualized by numerous military scholars shares many characteristics of guerrilla tactics in the classical military literature of Sun Tzu, Wellington, Clausewitz, Mao, and Giap. Proponents of 4GW claim that its development has significantly altered the ratio of strength of industrialized and guerrilla forces, and thus the likelihood of weaker forces (as measured in previous military contexts) prevailing against forces assessed by traditional measures as stronger. Critics point to a lack of intellectual rigor in defining the salient characteristics of 4GW and charge that it is simply a re-statement of classical guerrilla war (CGW) tactics, albeit with improved communications and propaganda capabilities in a social media cultural context. This research models CGW and 4GW in conjunction with the irregular subset of 5GW in an agent-based simulation using NetLogo software (Wilensky, 1999) in order to explore differences in time and probability of victory and increased area of territory controlled by 4GW and irregular 5GW forces. These forces are then pitted against their respective industrial-age and information-age opponents. Emergent behaviors offer insights into the similarities and differences of CGW. The outputs are then compared to historical data to help answer the question of whether 4/5GW comprise a significant military revolution that threatens to upend traditional measures of military superiority, or they are merely an adaptation of old tactics to a new context. The results generally favored the rebels in both CGW and 4/5GW scenarios. Increasing Red Communications capability in the 4/5GW scenario overall increased Red Territory controlled as compared to the CGW scenario. However, increasing Blue Communications capability also increased Red Territory gained in both models. This could be interpreted that an overall increase in communications capabilities leads to more aggressive tactics and more engagements for both sides. Blue and Red communications in the 4/5GW scenarios are also associated with a decrease in both Red and Blue time to victory, indicating that the pace of engagements is accelerated in the 4/5GW scenarios. Finally, the model comparing identity of victor after 10 years produced mixed results. An increase in Red Communications was associated with a decrease in the log-odds of Blue Victory after 10 years in 4/5GW model, as expected. However, an increase Blue Communications also appeared to be associated with an increase in the log-odds of Red Victory in the 4/5GW model, a somewhat contradictory result. The addition of 21st century technologies seemed to change the overall dynamic compared to CGW only in specific cases, and usually only marginally. The research project was purposefully designed so that the 4/5GW capabilities would be additions to a basic model of guerrilla warfare. There is danger that these additions were simply insufficient in modeling the true extent of the differences between the two concepts of war, and that 4/5GW tactics are, in fact, revolutionary and not evolutionary. Further study is required to answer the question conclusively

Research Naval Postgraduate School, v.12, no.3, October 2002

NPS Research is published by the Research and Sponsored Programs, Office of the Vice President and Dean of Research, in accordance with NAVSOP-35. Views and opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Department of the Navy.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited