The Role of Experimentation in Building Future Naval Forces (2004) / Chapter Skim
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2 Experimentation--What It Means
2 Experimentation--What It Means
Pages 28-47
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From page 28... ...
The definition highlights the fact that building future naval forces through experimentation means more than acquiring the equipment of the future. Building tomorrow's Navy and Marine Corps means developing the doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF)
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joint warfighting concept elements to ascertain whether elements of a joint warfighting concept cause changes in military effectiveness."1 Given actual practice, this definition is relatively narrow with respect to both the purpose of joint experimentation and its methods.
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More recently, the DOD has favored the term "field experiments." The USJFCOM glossary defines "field experiments" as "wargames conducted in the actual environment with military units and equipment." It does not offer a separate definition for "warfighting experiments."8 The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review refers to "field exercises that incorporate experimentation."9 Both of these sources hold that such exercises should emphasize the operational level of war rather than the tactical or strategic. Because the term "field experiment" is used today to mean the same thing that "warfighting experiment" meant 4 years ago, the committee has chosen to use the two terms interchangeably.
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From page 31... ...
Experimentation Campaigns Advance Understanding Systematically Using experimentation for selecting, developing, and implementing future capabilities means invoking a full spectrum of activities systematically. An experimentation campaign is a planned and cohesive, multiyear program of experimentation built on a series of experiments and related activities to 10 It seems to be a common impression that "demonstrations" are biased against failures, in contrast to "experiments," which allow failures.
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The spectrum of activities includes seminars, work by subject-matter experts, studies and analyses, war games, and modeling and simulations, all of which usually precede and support actual field experiments. The field experiments themselves have varying objectives and sizes.
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Structuring a campaign allows planners to proceed along multiple axes of investigation while organizing events around broad goals and objectives. It also introduces multiple decision points, both for experiment planning and for identifying and prioritizing the interlinked changes in forces, equipment, concepts, and organizations that are the main objective of an experimentation campaign.12 It is important to understand why certain aspects of experimentation activities fail to meet expectations and how things might work under different conditions, and to document these results and apply them in subsequent experimentation.
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Transferability of Lessons from Experiments to Wartime Operations Safety concerns, resource constraints, artificially benign environments, and the absence of a real adversary make it impossible for experiments to reflect all of the actual conditions of military operations. As a result, lessons learned from experiments apply imperfectly to wartime operations.
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2002. Code of Best Practice Experimentation, DOD Command and Control Research Program, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)
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Experimentation Campaigns in Summary Single experiments are insufficient to provide the understanding needed to advance naval forces and their capabilities. Experimentation campaigns enable multiple axes of investigation, with a spectrum of activities that can be matched to the question posed.
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This section discusses the importance of the well-known spiral development process and expands on spiral processes in experimentation campaigns. Spiral Development In 2001 and 2002, the DOD revised its acquisition directives to specify evolutionary acquisition as the preferred strategy for rapid acquisition of mature technology and spiral development as the means to implement it.16 Spiral development makes it possible to accelerate the delivery of capabilities that cut across multiple user communities, that involve rapidly changing technologies, and/or that have initially vague or uncertain requirements.
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· Spiraling in an experimentation campaign. A process that uses a spectrum of experimental events to investigate a complex problem incrementally; each spiral typically involves many events and complex experiments, and each subsequent spiral addresses problem complexity that is greater than and/or different from what preceded it (e.g., when new operational concepts for ground forces are studied at successive levels -- company, then battalion, then brigade)
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Figure 2.2 illustrates an experimentation campaign that coevolves a mission capability package beginning with a straw DOTMLPF, which itself may have resulted from prior experimentation activities. Each campaign spiral is directed toward its own specific set of objectives, which are related to decisions about future forces.
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In the campaign illustrated, the spirals and their culminating events should be defined so as to allow for rapid incremental development and, if the development is successful, for the folding in of the new capabilities -- thus linking firmly into the spiral development/evolutionary acquisition model noted earlier. At culminating points throughout the campaign, mature, verified, and tested capability packages should be transitioned into new, fielded capabilities.
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The less-mature concepts, organizational changes, and technologies are either set aside or moved into the next spiral of experimentation. THE ENVIRONMENT FOR EXPERIMENTATION As noted earlier, experimentation relies on a wide spectrum of experimental activities, from studies and analyses, seminars and conferences, war games, modeling and simulation, to live play events.
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Dennis, and Daniel T Maxwell, 2002, Code of Best Practice Experimentation, DOD Command and Control Research Program, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)
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Having repositories of such information available and accessible can ease experiment planning and enable the extension of results to cases or scenarios that are not included in the live play. Ultimately, a system that links platforms into a virtual environment is needed, to provide an appropriate level of realism in live experimentation conducted across a fleet.
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McNair, Washington, D.C., July. 22Constructive experiments use simulated forces in a simulated environment; virtual experiments use partial real forces in a simulated environment; field experiments use real forces in an actual environment.
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In response to such constraints, the military services and the joint community are increasingly using their training exercises as vehicles for experimentation, in essence tacking experiments onto exercises that units would perform in any case. This occurs so frequently that a military exercise is often characterized as an experiment.
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This requirement reinforces the need for a wellplanned experimentation campaign that includes an appropriate complement of activities both preceding and following field experiments. Field events should 23The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Joint Publication 1-02)
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EXPERIMENTATION -- WHAT IT MEANS 47 continue to improve in rigor; however, it is also important that the full spectrum of activities augment field experiments to ensure the application of good scientific and analytical methods. This combination will convey a more coherent and incisive picture of the results of the fixed experiments, which enables discarding or substantiating and extending findings while determining the many factors that shape these live-play events.
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