(phil hunt) wrote in message ...
On 22 Sep 2003 08:49:13 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:

No, the "digital battlefield electronics", as you call it, is NOT an
interim solution awaiting the fielding of FCS. Instead, FCS is merely
a concept of an entire family of new equipment that will more
completely integrate the evolving digital, ISR,

What's ISR?

Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.


As usual with military affairs, there's no panacea and the guy you're
trying to kill has powerful incentives to circumvent your advantages.

And just as usual, the accuracy of computer simulations of tactical
ground fights is strongly suspect.

Garbage in, garbage out.

No, not so much GIGO as it is a matter of the goals of the simulation,
which is usually to stress the side being exercised. That retired USMC
GO who ran the JFC exercise last year was whining about how he could
not conduct true "free play", and that certain actions of his were
rescinded by the exercise controllers, but that ignored the fact that
the game had for one of its primary goals, for example, the validation
of the IBCT/SBCT as a tool for the JTF commander--sliming the APOD
that was to serve that unit might be a "real world" thing to consider,
but it is stupid to spend beaucoup millions of bucks on a massive
exercise like that and then see one of your exercise objectives
disappear before it can even get into the game and be evaluated at
*any* level (likewise, had he sent a nuke at the JTF command post on
day one and wiped it out, it would have been rather stupid to say,
"hey, I guess the exercise is over; sorry we wasted all of those unds
and resources..."). We saw the same thing at NTC during force-on-force
exercises; when I was with the OPFOR we got away with things that the
Bluefor could not hope to do, but the objective was to stress the
Bluefor, so some leniency in our direction was allowed as long as it
served that goal. The key is to remember that these large scale sims
are great at taking on the "big picture", just not-so-great at
modeling the action at the lower levels (we once ran a corps level WFX
that was classified at the time because we were using the actual "into
Iraq" CONPLAN then under development--we basicly got our clocks
cleaned by the OPFOR, which was unrealistic, but served the purpose of
stressing the staff and the plan).

Brooks