No abstract

No abstract

Operation Desert Storm shattered the myth that the next war U.S. forces would fight would be a European battle between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The senior leadership of the Army, in conjunction with the National Command Authority, demanded insights from combat simulations to assist in war‐planning and war‐fighting efforts for Operation Desert Storm. This article describes how an existing theater‐level simulation, the Concepts Evaluation Model, was used by analysts at the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA) to simulate Desert Storm in support of those efforts, and details specific innovations that may have applications for future contingency operations. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The increased focus of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency has served to identify the lack of credible models and simulations to represent the relevant civilian populations -the centers of gravity of such operations. While agent-based models (ABMs) have enjoyed widespread use in the social science community, many senior DoD officials are skeptical that agent-based models can provide useful tools to underpin DoD analysis, training, and acquisition needs mainly because of validation concerns. This paper uses docking and other forms of alignment that enable the linking of the Epstein civil violence agent-based model results to other models. These examples of model-to-model analysis could serve to assist and encourage DoD ABM human domain model validation efforts. BackgroundIn 2006, as the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on, the first codification of the doctrine that was being developed and applied was published in FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency. This document made clear that the focus of a counterinsurgency campaign is on influencing local populations. Senior US Department of Defense (DoD) officials, who sought to better understand how their armed forces should be organized, trained and equipped for such operations, looked to their modeling and simulation community for help. That community, well-equipped to examine kinetic operations, had little to contribute in this domain. Modeling human and social behavior quickly became the focus of the DoD modeling and simulation (M&S) community, and agent-based models (ABMs) began to receive increased interest and scrutiny. ABMs have enjoyed popularity within several areas of the social sciences, and their use, coupled with the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has attracted the attention of DoD.This increased DoD focus on irregular warfare (IW) and counterinsurgency has served to identify the lack of credible models and simulations to represent civilian populations in conflict environments. In addition, the lack of social science expertise to inform DoD M&S efforts and the lack of data to represent social science phenomenon have also been identified as critical gaps affecting DoD's ability to model IW-like scenarios. While agentbased models have enjoyed widespread use in the social science community, many senior DoD officials are skeptical that agent-based models can provide useful tools to underpin DoD analysis, training, and acquisition needs.A key requirement for any M&S used by DoD is that it be validated. 1 DoD's definition of validation is ''The process of determining the degree to which a model or simulation and its associated data are an accurate representation

The US Department of Defense (DoD) requires all models and simulations that it manages, develops, and/or uses to be verified, validated, and accredited. Critical to irregular warfare (IW) modeling are interactions between combatants and the indigenous population. Representation of these interactions (human behavior representation (HBR)) requires expertise from several of the many fields of social science. As such, the verification, validation, and accreditation (VVA) of these representations will require adaptation and, in some cases, enhancement of traditional DoD VVA techniques. This paper suggests validation best practices for the DoD modeling community to address new challenges of modeling IW.