Situation awareness measurement: A review of applicability for C4i environments

The construct of situation awareness (SA) has become a core theme within the human factors (HF) research community. Consequently, there have been numerous attempts to develop reliable and valid measures of SA but there is a lack of techniques developed specifically for the assessment of SA in command, control, communication, computers and intelligence (C4i) environments. During the design, development and evaluation of novel systems, technology and procedures, valid and reliable situation awareness measurement techniques are required for the assessment of individual and team SA, in order to determine the improvements (or in some cases decrements) resulting from proposed design and technological interventions. The paper presents a review of existing situation awareness measurement techniques for their suitability for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments. Seventeen SA measures were evaluated against a set of HF methods criteria. It was concluded that current SA measurement techniques are inadequate by themselves for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments, and a multiple-measure approach utilising different approaches is recommended

NATO Code of Best Practice for C2 Assessment

This major revision to the Code of Best Practice (COBP) for C2 Assessment is the product of a NATO Research and Technology Organisation (RTO) sponsored Research Group (SAS-026). It represents over a decade of work by many of the best analysts from the NATO countries. A symposium (SAS-039) was hosted by the NATO Consultation Command Control Agency (NC3A) that provided the venue for a rigorous peer review of the code. This new version of the COBP for C2 assessment builds upon the initial version of the COBP produced by SAS-002. The earlier version focused on the analysis of ground forces at a tactical echelon in mid- to high-intensity conflicts. In developing this new version of the COBP, SAS-026 focused on a changed geopolitical context characterized by a shift from preoccupation with a war involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact to concern for a broad range of smaller military conflicts and Operations Other Than War (OOTW). This version also takes into account the impact of significantly improved information-related capabilities and their implications for reducing the fog and friction traditionally associated with conflict. Significantly reduced levels of fog and friction offer an opportunity for the military to develop new concepts of operations, new organizational forms, and new approaches to C2, as well as to the processes that support it. In addition, SAS-026 was cognizant that NATO operations are likely to include coalitions of the willing that might involve Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations, other partners outside of NATO, international organizations, and NGOs. Cost analyses continue to be excluded because they differ among NATO members, so no single approach would be appropriate. Advances in technology are expected to continue at an increasing rate and spur both sustaining and disruptive innovation in military organizations. It is to be expected that this COBP will need to be periodically revisited in light of these developments.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/msve_books/1012/thumbnail.jp

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

The cyber simulation terrain: Towards an open source cyber effects simulation ontology

Cyber resilience is characterised by an ability to understand and adapt to changing network conditions, including cyber attacks. Cyber resilience may be characterised by an effects-based approach to missions or processes. One of the fundamental preconditions underpinning cyber resilience is an accurate representation of current network and machine states and what missions they are supporting. This research outlines the need for an ontological network representation, drawing on existing literature and implementations in the domain. This work then introduces an open-source ontological representation for modelling cyber assets for the purposes of Computer Network Defence. This representation encompasses computers, network connectivity, users, software, vulnerabilities and exploits and aims for interoperability with related representations in common use. The utility of this work is highlighted against a functional use-case depicting a realistic operational network and mission. Finally, a future research direction is defined

Issues in Modeling Military Space

Fighter Pilots students undertake an intense 120-day training program. New classes of students enter the training program at regular interval. Students endured rigorous academic, simulator, and aircraft training throughout the program. Squadron schedulers ensure the multiple classes and students are scheduled for the activities. Simulator and aircraft training are scheduled individual for each student. Academic training are taught to the class. Aircraft utilization must also be considered. Aircraft Sortie training are also constrained by daylight hours. Additionally, students are limited to a maximum of three training events in a given day. Squadron schedulers must balance these requirements to ensure students meet their training requirements and successfully graduate. The dynamic training environment requires advanced robust schedules with flexibility to accommodate changes. A Visual Interactive Modeling approach is used to generate schedules. Current schedules are being generated manually with an Excel spreadsheet. Taking advantage of Excel\u27s Visual Basic Programming language, the Excel tool is modified in several ways. Scheduling Dispatch rules are implemented to automatically generate feasible schedules. Graphical User Interfaces are used to create a user-friendly environment. Schedulers guide the schedule building process to produce a robust schedule. An attrition environment is created to simulate attrition probabilities of aircraft sortie training due to operations, maintenance, weather, and other cancellations. Analysis of dispatch rules are analyzed

Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

Proceedings of a conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, on November 15-16, 1988. The Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: space applications of expert systems in fault diagnostics, in telemetry monitoring and data collection, in design and systems integration; and in planning and scheduling; knowledge representation, capture, verification, and management; robotics and vision; adaptive learning; and automatic programming

Modeling and Analysis of Resolve and Morale for the `Long War\u27

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu begins by stating: War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied. Sun Tzu follow\u27s this opening by stating five fundamental factors a commander must master to be successful in combat. The first of these factors is moral influence which Sun Tzu defines as that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders, so they will accompany them in life and death without fear of mortal peril. In the face of the instant communication provided by satellites, 24 hour news media coverage, and other technological advances, this factor is even more relevant today. This research provides an analytic framework, based on the principles of fourth generation operations, capturing the effects of will and resolve of the combatant and population. The strategic level model investigates the long term impacts of asymmetric conflict. These results are primarily measured in the socio-political arena rather than the military battlefield. The model developed in this dissertation remains a model of conflict and combat. However, some of the impacts from the political, economic, and informational instruments of power are represented in the model through the dynamic adaptation of public resolve and combat spirit. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, war is vitally important and must be studied. Therefore, this dissertation puts forth a means to model key aspects of conflict in the `long war\u27

Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications, part 2

Topics relative to the application of artificial intelligence to space operations are discussed. New technologies for space station automation, design data capture, computer vision, neural nets, automatic programming, and real time applications are discussed