The United States Army is frenetically engaged in an ambitious initiative to transform itself from a Cold War legacy force into a new millennium force, the Objective Force, designed to dominate potential enemies through the first half of the new century. The centerpiece of this transformed Army will be the Future Combat System (FCS). The common expectation of this transformed force is that it will derive its dominance over potential rivals by taking full advantage of a potential Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) anchored in a host of current and near-future technological advances. Our research presents a more mature understanding of what may ultimately comprise the next RMA and offers a model of battlefield information functional design that can guide FCS system design and that of the Objective Force overall.
Purpose of this paper is defining a framework for the "Warfighter-Centered Design (WCD)" of new concepts for naval combat systems. This framework explicitly takes into account the business value of WCD with respect to safety, optimal manning and reduced lifecycle costs. WCD improves safety because lack of usability can lead to serious consequences; the analysis of the accident of USS Vincennes clearly shows that the combat system exhibited serious usability problems both in estimating the altitude trend of an air track and in the IFF identification. WCD holds also a significant economic value because it reduces the lifecycle costs related to ship manning and training and allows optimal solutions to the evolution to asymmetric and littoral warfare. Warfighter-Centered Design is not a methodology or a set of techniques, but an integrated approach to product concept design that focuses explicitly on the needs and limitations of the warfighter. It is based on user involvement, iterative prototyping and user-based assessment and it can focus on the different levels of the Command Information Center organization and consoles.
This report summarizes the research findings of a short-time-frame study conducted by RAND Arroyo Center to support the Army Science Board (ASB) Summer Study 2000 "Technical and Tactical Opportunities for Revolutionary Advances in Rapidly Deployable Joint Ground Forces in the 2015-2020 Era. The purpose of the RAND research was to explore a range of advanced technologies for potential contribution to the Future Combat Systems program; it is intended to be a think piece and is not a guide to the contractors charged with designing the Future Combat Systems. This research represents only one part of the ASB study, focusing specifically on force effectiveness in a notional small-scale contingency and on the associated spectrum of challenges that such a situation might entail. In conducting the study, the research team interacted with various members of the ASB, drawing extensively on their forward-looking ideas and ultimately integrating many of them into the research. High-resolution combat modeling and simulation was used to assess many key aspects of force performance, environmental factors, and system-of-systems interactions within the context of the scenario. This work should be of interest to defense policymakers, military technologists, and concept developers.
Army R & D labs have played a crucial role in the evaluation of emerging systems that equipped the war fighter with superior lethality. The Future Combat System's (FCS) aggressive acquisition strategy of conventional (armor, munitions, propulsion) and non-conventional (unmanned sensors, robotics) technologies place a greater demand on labs for rapid and accurate analysis of potential weapon systems. A combination of validated engineering analysis codes, Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) and Enterprise Commercial Off the Shelf Software (COTS) can greatly accelerate the evaluation of candidate systems. Traditional Modeling and Simulation (M & S) activities are not well suited for today's acquisition environment. In particular, they suffer from: premature design commitment, a failure to quickly identify dominant design factors and adapt to changing design requirements. Many of these problems stem from a lack of human engineering concurrency and communication. A partial solution to this problem is to enable virtual collaboration among a lab's modeling and simulation codes. Genetic Algorithms (GA), a subset of EA's, are an ideal catalyst for multidisciplinary concept exploration. GA's mimic the selection process that occurs among biological species in nature, but to various engineering disciplines they provide an excellent focal point in determining a weapon system's optimal configuration based on a set of given mission parameters. The organizational and cultural impact of setting up this type of virtual cooperation is far reaching and cannot be overstated. Concept exploration engines have been around for a number of years; an outstanding example is the Integrated Hypersonic Aeromechanics Tool (IHAT) used at Naval Air Command, China Lake to design hypersonic air breathing vehicles in the Mach 4-8 regime. Likewise, the Aviation and Missile Command has adopted a multidisciplinary approach through its Army Missile Collaborative Design Environment (AMCODE).
