The Magazine of National Security Analysis | Spring 2023

Volume 56, Number 1 In This Issue: • Our first ChatGPT written article • Getting ready for data science • DHS and USMC Sponsors speak out

In This Issue MORS

2....................................................................... MORS President: Unlock Your Potential with MORS:

Enhance Your Professional Development, Embrace AI

6...................................................................91st MORS Symposium: Analytics as a Force Multiplier 10......................................................................Highlighting Women in OR and Their Achievements 14......................................................................................................... MORS Leads Gaming in the Pacific 18...................................................................................................................................MORS Training Bulletin

Professional Features

2111 Wilson Boulevard Suite 700 Arlington, VA 22201 (703) 933-9070; FAX (703) 933-9066 e-mail: [email protected] www.mors.org

20......................................................................... Data Science: What Is It? How Is the Department of Defense Educating for It?

In Touch

32...................................................................Book Review: How Important Are Superior Numbers? A Reappraisal of Lanchester’s Square Law

38............................................ MORS Publications Committee Professional Reading List 2023 40.....................................................................................................................................MORS Young Analyst 42............................................................................................................................................................Milestones 43................................................................................................. Phalanx Policy on Letters to the Editor 47................................................................................................................................Ms. Robbin Beall Retires

Sponsor’s Corner

44................................................................................................Total Analytic Integration Is Achievable 50....................................................... Re-Introducing MORS Government Sponsor: Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate’s Operations and Requirements Analysis Division In the winter issue of Phalanx, we incorrectly attributed the article on DSTL’s David Cox winning the Morry Frost Award for Excellence in Defence Operations Research to Fred Bowden. It should have been attributed to David Kilmartin, Defence Science Communication, Australian Department of Defence. We regret the error.

Phalanx Staff Editor: Mr. Terry J. McKearney, FS, The Ranger Group, [email protected] Production Editor: Ms. Joan Taylor, MORS, [email protected] Graphic Design/Layout: Mr. Romain Falloux, MORS, [email protected]

Department Editors

Dr. Greg Parlier NCSU and GH Parlier Consulting Naval Analysis, Dr. Brian G. McCue, CNA, [email protected] Letters to the Editor, MORS Office, [email protected] Modeling and Simulation, Mr. James N. Bexfield, FS, [email protected] Numbers from Operations, Mr. George W.S. Kuhn, LMI, [email protected]

Book Reviews

CDR Nick Ulmer, SC, Naval Postgraduate School, [email protected]

Printed On Recycled Paper

MORS Publications Committee

(Chair) Dr. Steven Lagan, Army Futures Command (DEVCOM Chemical Biological Center) (Co-Chair) MAJ Jaison Desai, PhD, U.S. Army Cyber Command Technical Warfare Center Dr. David Azari, U.S. Army Futures Command Dr. Nathaniel Bastian, Army Cyber Institute, U.S. Military Academy Ms. Brittlea Brown, Headquarters Marine Corps Programs & Resources Dr. Roger Burk, USMA Ms. Stephanie Caico, IDA Dr. Richard Deckro, AFIT Dr. Jefferson Huang, Naval Postgraduate School Mr. Terry J. McKearney, FS, The Ranger Group CAPT Douglas E. Otte, USN (Ret.), Naval Postgraduate School Dr. Matthew Powers, The MITRE Corporation Mr. Jed Richards, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ERDC CDR Nick Ulmer, SC, Naval Postgraduate School

MORS Officers PRESIDENT Dr. Les Servi The MITRE Corporation PRESIDENT ELECT Dr. Andrew Turner Northrop Grumman VICE PRESIDENT (FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT) Ms. Kristi Bane IST VICE PRESIDENT (MEETING OPERATIONS) Ms. Sarah Stewart Center for Army Analysis VICE PRESIDENT (PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT) Mr. Jed Richards U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ERDC IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Mr. David Saranchak Concurrent Technologies Corporation SECRETARY OF THE SOCIETY Dr. Jonell Samberson Sandia National Laboratories CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Ms. Jennifer A. Ferat Military Operations Research Society [email protected]

The Phalanx (ISSN 0195-1920) is published quarterly, $70.00 for one year or $125.00 for two years (U.S. rates) by the Military Operations Research Society. Principal office: 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 700, Arlington, Virginia 22201. Periodicals postage paid at Arlington, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Phalanx, 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 700, Arlington, Virginia 22201. Please allow 4-6 weeks for address change activation.

DISCLAIMER: MORS is a professional society for people, not organizations. As such, the articles published in Phalanx represent the professional views and judgments of individuals independent of the organization that may employ them or contract for their services. Except where specifically identified, statements and opinions do not necessarily reflect policies or positions of the Department of Defense or any other agency of the US Government. © 2023, Military Operations Research Society.

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MORS

PRESIDENT

Unlock Your Potential with MORS: Enhance Your Professional Development, Embrace AI Dr. Les Servi, President, Military Operations Research Society

T

he mission of MORS is to “enhance the quality of analysis that informs national and homeland security decisions.” This core purpose is vital not only for the nation, but also for our Sponsors and our members. The first word of our mission, “enhance,” suggests that we must never be content individually or as a Society, but instead should aspire to have even greater effectiveness and knowledge. This is the essence of professional development. A SWOT analysis (i.e., a strategic view of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of an organization or mission) of MORS would reveal that a core differentiating strength of our Society is its professional development activities. Our offerings are of the highest quality and the offerings and demand for them are accelerating. In a decentralized manner, some are guided by our Sponsors and Partners, making them particularly adaptive to the rapid changes in analytics and our Nation’s priorities. In just the past few months, we ran the successful special meeting on “Scoping the Analytical Implications of Climate Change and Extreme Events for National Security,” and by the time this message is published we’ll have held another

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on ”Wargaming with Pacific Partners,” as well as completed a two-day Education and Professional Development Colloquium (EPD). This year, MORS had more than 700 attendees and 550 presentations at our annual Symposium, nine unique certificates courses, four short courses, 23 communities of practice (including a recently launched one in probability management), 35 working groups, and monthly MORS talks. As we continue to strive for excellence in professional development, it is important to consider the potential impact of new technologies such as the beta application, ChatGPT,1 on our members’ professional growth. ChatGPT emergence is shaking the world and with this message I want to encourage more discussion for how it will impact us. 1.

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) based on the transformer architecture, which is a type of neural network used for natural language processing (NLP). It is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) series of language modes that uses an autoregressive approach to generate text. Autoregressive models are a type of Generative AI that generate new content by predicting the next token in a sequence based on the preceding tokens. This message, for clarity, focuses on ChatGPT but is applicable to this broader context.

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Back to Table of Contents Figure 1. The importance of professional development according to ChatGPT. Dear Military Operations Research Society (MORS) community, As the President of MORS, I want to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of professional development

within our field. The field of military operations research is constantly evolving, and it is essential that we all stay current with the latest techniques and technologies to be able to provide the best possible support to the military. Mors provides many opportunities for professional development, such as conferences, workshops, seminars, and online resources. In encourage all of our members to take advantage of these opportunities to enhance their skills and knowledge, and to actively seek out opportunities for growth and development. Additionally, mentorship is a powerful tool for professional development, and I encourage our more experienced members to take on mentee, and for members at all levels to seek out mentorship opportunities. In conclusion, professional development is critical to our success as practitioners and to the success of our organization. Let’s take advantage of all the opportunities MORS provides, to ensure that we continue to be at the forefront of the field of military operations research.

Best, [Your Name]

If you are not one of the 100 million people who experimented with ChatGPT since its launch last November, ChatGPT can be introduced by seeing its response when I asked it to write a two paragraph message about the importance of professional development that the president of MORS might write. The response, unedited, is in Figure 1. While ChatGPT was not successful at counting the number of paragraphs it wrote, made some grammatical errors, and lacked some specific context, it created a very good first draft. On a more practical level, I asked it to write software code. I gave it a simple task for which its response was emblematic of ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses. I asked: LS: Write code in python to read cell A1 and B1 from an excel spreadsheet and then add all of the integers between and including the content of cell A1 to the content of cell B1.

Figure 2. ChatGPT generated MATLAB code. Here is an example of how you can read cells A1 and B1 of an excel spreadsheet in Python and add all of the integers between and including the contents of those cells: import pandas as pd # Load the spreadsheet file_path = ‘path/to/spreadsheet.xlsx’ df = pd.read_excel(file_path) # Get the values from cells A1 and B1 a1 = df.iloc[0, 0] b1 = df.iloc[0, 1] # Check if the values are integers if not (isinstance(a1, int) and isinstance(b1, int)): raise ValueError(“A1 and B1 must contain integers.”) # Add all integers between and including A1 and B1 result = sum(range(min(a1, b1),

max(a1, b1) + 1))

# Print the result print(result)

The response, in seconds, is shown in Figure 2.

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Seeing this solid-looking code generated in seconds is nothing less than dazzling to the point of perhaps being troubling if writing code were an important part of one’s job. However, the code is deeply flawed: The code will always generate an incorrect output.2 Moreover, for large examples, the speed of the code is radically slower than necessary as it does not leverage the well-known formula for the summation of all the integers between A1 and B1. It is instructive to learn that the formula that ChatGPT failed to use was accessible to it as illustrated with the prompt: LS: What is the mathematical formula for adding all of the integers between and including A1 to B1? The answer was long winded, but it ended with

So, the formula for adding all of the integers between and including A1 to B1 is:

ChatGPT can be illustrated by the following prompt and response: LS: Write code in python to read cell A1 and B1 from an excel spreadsheet and then add all of the integers between and including the content of cell A1 to the content of cell B1. Use the well known mathematical formula for computing such summations. Figure 3. Improved ChatGPT generated MATLAB code.

import pandas as pd # Load the spreadsheet file_path = ‘path/to/spreadsheet.xlsx’ df = pd.read_excel(file_path) # Get the values from cells A1 and B1 a1 = df.iloc[0, 0] b1 = df.iloc[0, 1] # Check if the values are integers if not (isinstance(a1, int) and isinstance(b1, int)): raise ValueError (“A1 and B1 must contain integers.”)

S = (|B1 – A1| + 1)/2 * (A1 + B1)

# Compute the sum of integers between and including A1 and B1 using the mathematical formula n = abs(b1 – a1) + 1 result = (n * (a1 +b1)) // 2

Please note that this formula assumes that A1 and B1

# Print the result print(result)

are integers.

This is correct. The importance of quality engineering of prompts to ChatGPT and the advantages of collaborating with 2.

The line “result = sum(range(min(A1, B1), max(A1, B1) + 1))” should not have the “+ 1” in it.

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Figure 3 displays the end of a long-winded response. It looks good to me. This example, however simple, hints at the vast knowledge that ChatGPT has access to and how it can be leveraged in software. The weaknesses that led to the path of generating this code reminds us that it needs to be guided, supervised,

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Back to Table of Contents Figure 4. MORS and machine learning. In many cases, human MORS members are better suited to certain problems than machine learning (ML) due to their unique abilities and characteristics. Some examples include:

1. Creative problem-solving: MORS members are able to think critically, creatively, and outside the box to solve complex problems that may not be easily solvable by ML. 2. Contextual understanding: MORS members have the ability to understand the context and nuances of a problem, which is important when dealing with situations that involve human behavior and decision-making. 3. Ethical considerations: MORS members are able to take into account ethical considerations when making decisions and recommendations, which is important when dealing with issues that have significant moral implications. 4. Explaining decision making: MORS members are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions, which can be important for building trust and understanding among stakeholders. 5. Human-in-the-loop: MORS members can be used in a human-in-the-loop process, where they can validate and refine the recommendations made by ML systems. 6. Gaining insights from data: MORS members can be used to gain insights from data that ML models may not be able to uncover. They can use their knowledge and expertise to interpret the data and identify patterns that may not be immediately obvious. It is also worth noting that ML models can be used to assist MORS members in their work, by providing them with large amounts of data and helping them to identify patterns and make predictions.

and checked by an experienced software analyst writing thoughtful prompts to ensure the tasks are not only done quickly but correctly and using the best knowledge available. If done well, there is potential for vast productivity gains.3 As we learn how to work most effectively with ChatGPT, we must be reminded that ChatGPT, and its related cousins, are just beginning to accelerate up Moore’s Law4 as well as the innovative AI world. Hence, progress must be tracked and regularly responded to. Our challenge, as with all technological advances, is to recognize the opportunities while mitigating the threats. That is an important role of MORS. 3.

4.

For me personally, I used ChatGPT to write a first draft of some software, which permitted me to do in two hours what would have taken me considerably longer to do from scratch. This enabled me to explore the germ of a risky idea related to reinforced learning that I otherwise would not have time to do. Of course, the initial ChatGPT code emerged in seconds. Moore’s Law is the prediction made by Gordon Moore (1929 – 2023) in 1965 that the number of transistors double approximately every two years, while the cost of the microchip will be halved. This enables the processing power of computers to increase exponentially while the cost of manufacturing decreases.

Figure 4 illustrates a prompt and response, including implications regarding ChatGPT and machine learning in general as it applies to our members: LS: How should the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) best prepare its members for the increased capability of machine? I end by encouraging you to f Engage with ChatGPT: Be part of the 100 million people who have tried it. Develop your own view about it. Think of ways to incorporate ChatGPT into MORS offerings and help you and your sponsors.5 f Engage with MORS Professional Development: Fully take advantage of the many MORS professional development offerings and suggest new ways how MORS can help your professional development. f Engage with MORS: Let me know of any other issue of importance to you or how I can help you engage more with MORS. 5.

At the time of this writing, we are exploring bringing a ChatGPT panel discussion or related activity to our annual Symposium.

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91stst MORS Symposium: Analytics as a Force Multiplier June 12–15, 2023, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY

O

perations research (OR) professionals are important members of the national security and homeland security team. In everything we do in national and homeland security OR, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently about data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). We support senior leader decision making through modeling and simulation, the use of AI/ML, detailed analysis, continuing education, and collaborative analysis. Do you want your analysis to provide insight and support national security senior leaders? If so, the Military Operations Research Society (MORS), active in the national security OR arena, just happens to have an event to share methods, techniques, and tools, both unclassified and classified. Want to join us? Attend the 91st MORS Symposium this summer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 12–15. The annual MORS Symposium is the premier opportunity for the national and homeland security OR community to exchange information, examine research, and discuss critical national security topics, with a focus on the analytical components of those topics.

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Working in the national and homeland security OR community has challenged us to change how we think, act, and communicate (see Sinek, 2009). We challenge you as well to change, and we think the MORS Symposium can help you. Why is MORS so innovative year after year after year after year—more innovative than others, yet with the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same tools, and the same techniques? Why does MORS seem to have something different? MORS and the MORS Symposium are excellent platforms to communicate and impact the data, analytics, and AI phenomenon. Here are some reasons the MORS Symposium could be the place for you: f Professional development: »

The symposium is a place to reflect on yourself across four days, both during the sessions and in the hallways and on the sidewalks.

»

Observing the work your peers are doing helps you look at what you and your team are doing in a new light.

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Back to Table of Contents f Information brokering: »

»

Analytical techniques: There is always work being presented that is using something you and/or your organization have not seen before. Take this opportunity to reach outside of your comfort zone to learn more. Subject matter: The MORS Symposium has presentations from every national security and homeland security domain, from healthcare to nuclear and strategic systems, and from manpower to cyber operations.

f Networking: »

Organizationally: You will get to know people across the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), industry, and academia. Maybe a contact you develop at the MORS Symposium can help your program.

»

Professionally: Your current job will not likely be your last job. Having a network of OR professionals to reach out to is a boon when job hunting.

»

Personally: Friendships are developed and sustained at MORS, built on a common passion for

OR and solving challenging problems in national defense and homeland security. f Present your work: »

Build your presentation skills and comfort in front of audiences.

»

Build your reputation as an OR professional.

»

Have your analysis reviewed by peers. Professional feedback from OR audiences at the MORS Symposium can be invaluable.

On behalf of the 57th MORS President and the 2022–2023 MORS Board of Directors, we officially welcome everyone to the upcoming 91st MORS Symposium! We are excited about the symposium and hope you are looking forward to joining your colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June.

Analytics as a Force Multiplier This year’s symposium theme is “Analytics as a Force Multiplier” and serves as a reminder to us and our leaders of the power of our methods. In the fall 2022 issue of

Preparing for a career in military operations research? Interested in solving real problems? Choose your degree path at

go.ncsu.edu/militaryOR

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Table 1. 91st MORS Symposium schedule. Monday June 12, 2023 1st session 2nd session Lunch 3rd session

Special sessions, . tutorials, and CEU . courses

Tuesday June 13, 2023 Plenary session

Wednesday June 14, 2023

Thursday June 15, 2023

WG session

WG session

WG session

WG session

WG session

WG session WG session

Jr. Analyst lunch WG session

4th session

WG session

WG session

Afterward

Networking social

Recognition dinner

Phalanx magazine, MORS President Dr. Les Servi outlined his vision of the theme of the MORS Symposium: “It reminds us to think big; big means order of magnitude improvements. Ten percent improvements should sometimes be viewed as being “in the noise.” It reminds us to take reasonable risks. It reminds us that if we always succeed, perhaps we are not being ambitious enough. The return on investment of the data, analytics, and AI comes from its game-changing potential, not from its batting average. Advocating for viewing data, analytics, and AI as a force multiplier for big improvements does not discount the less dramatic and often less visible but critically important work many in our Society do to advance our national and homeland security. We must do both!” Les Servi, 2022

We encourage all symposium participants to address the theme of “Analytics as a Force Multiplier” in abstract submissions and think how we can leverage emerging technologies, techniques, and concepts to better inform our data, analytics, and tools. How can we better collaborate across the OR community in support of national and homeland security? As you attend the various symposium sessions, consider these questions and how your analytics can be a force multiplier.

91st MORS Symposium Logistics This year’s symposium will be held over four days (see Table 1). Special sessions, tutorials, and CEU courses will be held on Monday, June 12. Tuesday morning attendees will experience the MORS Plenary session, featuring our keynote speaker and the presentation of prizes and awards. The remainder of the symposium will be composed of

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sessions presented and facilitated by MORS working groups, distributed working groups, and a focus group. In addition, several special sessions are scheduled. There will be a no-host networking mixer held in the evening on Tuesday, June 13, and a recognition dinner to honor the prize and award recipients on Wednesday, June 14. Additionally, since the U.S. Military Academy is hosting this event during the U.S. Army’s 248th birthday, MORS will be joining with the Academy to host a special Army birthday celebration. The 91st Symposium will feature 34 working groups, two distributed working groups, and one focus group (see Table 2). We are excited to announce two new events this year: f Wargaming panel f Discussion panel on ChatGPT Please visit the MORS website (www.MORS.org) for detailed descriptions of these events and the accepted abstracts that will be presented during each session. OR national and homeland security professionals from the government, industry, and academia attend the annual MORS Symposium to present and discuss topics of interest to national and homeland security. Every year, the MORS Symposium planning team (see Table 3) receives more than 800 abstracts spanning a variety of topics, sharing emerging analysis, concepts, and innovations to address our national security challenges. Our national and homeland security challenges remain, at times, elusive and challenging. We continue to reinforce a strong foundation based in sound OR practice through events such as the 91st MORS Symposium. We are confident that the symposium will enhance participants and our profession. The health and welfare of our OR community at the symposium is our number one priority. We are committed

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Back to Table of Contents Table 2. 91st MORS Symposium working groups (WG), distributed working groups (DWG), and focus group (FG).

Table 3. 91st MORS Symposium planning team. Position

Name Ms. Sarah Stewart, USA CIV

Working groups

Vice President for Meeting Operations

WG 1

Homeland Security Analysis

Program Chair

Mr. John R. Cobb IV, USCG CIV

WG 2

Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, . and Advanced Explosives (CBRNE) Defense

Working Group Coordinator

Lt Col Amanda Gustave, USAF

WG 3

Infrastructure Analyses, Protection and Recovery

Deputy Working Group Coordinator

Ms. Kindra Bane, Infoscitex Corp (CTR)

WG 4

Analytic Capability Development

Sponsor Representative

Mr. Martin Dubbs, USA CIV

WG 5

Cyber Operations

CDR Nick Ulmer, USN

WG 6

Command and Control (C2)

Prizes and Awards Coordinator

WG 7

ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance)

91st MORS Junior Analyst

LCDR Zack Franklin, USN

WG 8

Space Acquisition, Testing, and Operations

WG 9

Air and Missile Defense

WG 10 Joint Campaign Analysis WG 11

Land and Expeditionary Warfare

WG 12 Maritime Operations WG 13 Power Projection and Strike WG 14 Air Warfare WG 15 Health Service Support, Force Health Protection, and Casualty Estimation WG 16 Strategic Deployment and Distribution WG 17 Logistics, Reliability, and Maintainability WG 18 Manpower and Personnel WG 19 Readiness WG 20 Analytic Support to Training and Education WG 21 Operational Energy WG 22 Military Assessments WG 24 Test, Experimentation, and Evaluation WG 25 AoAs and Capability Development WG 26 Cost Analysis WG 27 Decision Analysis WG 28 Advances in Modeling and Simulation Techniques WG 29 Computational Advances in OR WG 30 Wargaming WG 31 Operational Environments WG 32 Special Operations and Irregular Warfare WG 33 Social Science Methods and Applications WG 34 Data Science and Analytics WG 35 AI and Autonomous Systems Distributed working groups

to hosting a safe and open event, making sure all the available protection measures are in place for the physical and mental well-being of all attendees. MORS Symposium attendees are required to adhere to all DoD and West Point COVID-19 restrictions. For more detailed, current information on the health and safety measures, please refer to the DoD website (www.defense.gov/Spotlights/ Coronavirus-DOD-Response/Latest-DOD-Guidance/) and the symposium website. Onsite, the MORS staff will notify attendees of any event requirements or changes. This year’s symposium would not be possible without the commitment of our government sponsors, including the U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and DHS. Additionally, we are grateful for the collaboration with our industry and national research partners, the work of the MORS professional staff, and the devotion of our MORS volunteers. These volunteers and professional staff are working countless hours to ensure the 91st MORS Symposium is a safe and successful event. We are extremely thankful to the many individuals from various organizations who are contributing to the planning of the 91st MORS Symposium. We are especially thankful to the U.S. Military Academy for hosting the 91st MORS Symposium. We look forward to seeing you at the 91st MORS Symposium in June!

DWG 1 Emerging Operations Research

References

DWG 2 Unmanned Systems

Servi, L. 2022. Analytics as a Force Multiplier, Phalanx, Vol 55, No 3, 2–4.

Focus group FG 1

Process and Performance Improvement

Sinek, S. 2009. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Penguin Business.

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Highlighting Women in OR and Their Achievements The Women in MORS Community of Practice is highlighting groundbreaking women in operations research (OR) past and present.

Dr. Lillian Gilbreth Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born and raised in Oakland, California, the oldest of nine children. Her German immigrant parents had achieved great success in industrial and real estate endeavors, making her household one of the wealthiest on the West Coast. Lillian convinced her father to allow her to attend the new University of California (UC) in Berkeley, where she first was awarded a bachelor’s in literature in 1900, then later her master’s in literature in 1902. She started classes for a PhD but interrupted her studies to take a European tour. In June 1903, she and a friend traveled to Boston to start the trip, where she met her chaperone and her chaperone’s cousin, Frank Gilbreth. While her master’s thesis had been on comparative literature, she had taken a good number of psychology classes. In January 1904, Lillian began actively supporting Frank in his work while they were secretly engaged and living on separate coasts. Her education became useful to Frank in two important ways. She wrote clearly and eloquently and her training in psychology would go on to be an important angle in Frank’s work. She organized his writings, and “Field Manual” was subsequently published under Frank’s name. She sent him a book on the theory of advertising and Frank began to use psychology in his advertising. After Lillian had renewed her studies, Frank encouraged her to pursue applied psychology. They married in October 1904.

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She finished her dissertation, but at the end, UC would not award her degree since she had moved to New York upon marriage and violated their final year in residency requirement. Her dissertation was first published in installments in the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Digest, and was later published as a book, The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching, and Installing Methods of Least Waste. In 1910, she and her husband, Frank, attended a joint meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Though she wasn’t presenting a paper at the meeting, her work on the psychology of management was highlighted by Frederick Taylor, who is generally credited as the father of industrial engineering, during his keynote address. Described as one of the first female engineers, Ms. Gilbreth enrolled at Brown University and published her second dissertation, The Elimination of Waste, and was awarded a PhD in psychology in 1915. Three days later, she gave birth to her seventh child. Her and her husband Frank’s research and writings, including the categorization of the elements of human motion and time and motion studies, are considered foundational to industrial engineering. As a team, they pioneered many of the early concepts of workplace efficiency and human factors, though Ms. Gilbreth is largely credited with the organization and actual writing of those concepts. She and her husband raised 12 children together,

Continued on page 12

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A DVA N C E D DATA A N A LY T I C S

       
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Continued from page 10

depicted in books, and later popular movies, written by two of her children, most notably Cheaper by the Dozen. Her husband died in 1924 and Lillian Gilbreth continued the work that they started, publishing two additional books and continuing to consult and research applications of psychology for the next 45 years. Controversially, Gilbreth and her husband were advocates for eugenics, a movement aimed at “improving” the genetic quality of the human population. Gilbreth was influenced by a young professor, Edward Thorndike, through her psychology coursework for her master’s degree. Thorndike became a leading figure in American psychology and was involved in the development of eugenics in America. Gilbreth was a pioneer in many ways. She taught classes at Bryn Mawr, Newark College of Engineering, and Rutgers University and was the working mother of 12 children. In 1935, she was the first woman appointed as a professor of management at Purdue University. She was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the second woman to join the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. She was the first woman (and only one of two) awarded the Hoover Medal. Established in 1929, the Hoover Medal annually recognizes great, unselfish, nontechnical services by engineers to humanity, administered by a board representing five engineering organizations: the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Lynette MB Arnhart, COL (U.S. Army, Retired), PhD, CBCP Lynette Arnhart has extensive experience as a leader and operations research analyst in the Army. She currently owns and operates TeamLogic IT in Central Wisconsin, providing IT support services and cybersecurity to local businesses. “Be all you can be” inspired Lyn when she first saw the Army commercial on television as a young girl. It continued to resonate throughout her career and her post Army life.

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Lyn enlisted in the Army in November 1984 while still in high school but later won an appointment to the United States Military Academy. She “discovered” operations research in an engineering course during her senior year and immediately knew that this kind of analysis would be a life-long passion. Upon graduation in May 1989, she was appointed as a Second Lieutenant in the Field Artillery. During her career, she led her platoon in earning a Nuclear Surety commendation. She rebranched to the Adjutant’s General Corps, where she took command and provided human resources support to more than 18,000 military personnel and their families. From there, Lyn attained her graduate degree in operations research from Colorado School of Mines and was stationed at the Pentagon, where she modeled the enlisted force of approximately 400,000 soldiers and recommended targets for recruiting and promotions. Later, she modeled the entire force, providing analysis to support the Army military pay and allowances budget of $43 billion. Her analysis helped the Secretary of Defense understand the need to appropriately size the Army to support simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Lyn modeled the Afghan Defense Forces to direct recruiting, training, promotions, and budget and also directed all coalition human resources for the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and NATO Training MissionAfghanistan. Later, at The Research and Analysis Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Lyn led the study plan design and analysis, provided recommendations, and ultimately assisted in integrating women into the then closed combat arms occupations. In her final assignment, Lyn led the assessment of coalition counter-Islamic State operations that informed national-level political decisions. Lyn has been commended by the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the Under Secretary of the Army, and was recognized as a Dr. Wilbur B. Payne Memorial Award winner in 2015 for excellence in analysis. In addition, Lyn holds a doctorate in operations research from George Mason University (2007), an MS in national resource strategy from the Eisenhower School/Industrial College of the Armed Forces (2012), and is a Certified Business Continuity Professional (2020). In her spare time, she likes to be outdoors or creating. What is an aspect of your career that you are most proud of? That’s a hard question to answer. People generally think about their achievements. I have done a lot of things and there is not a single accomplishment that I have ever felt

Back to Table of Contents mattered more than the others; each was important in its own context and time. Having led people since I was 22, I find it incredibly fulfilling to watch those with whom I have worked get promoted and do great things. For instance, one of my sergeants went to Officer Candidate School, retired from the Army, and has now started his own recruiting business and is helping Service members who are transitioning from the Service. I also had the opportunity to pass on my O5 shoulder boards to my roommate who passed them on to a mentee of mine when she got promoted. She wore them while in battalion command and has just passed them on to another amazing officer who is getting promoted. So, summing that up, it’s two things: I am most proud of the things that matter, helping others achieve their aspirations and contributing to and extending legacies of excellence. What are the key events that got you where you are now in your career? ER403 Engineering Design at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) showed me that I loved analysis and wanted to do more of it however I could. Then as a lieutenant, my battery commander was designated as a functional area 49 (Army ORSA) and had the packet from personnel command laying on his desk. When I started looking at it, he told me that I could do the same. It was how I learned that the Army would send me to graduate school to study the topic that I loved. After I had my master’s degree, multiple senior ORSAs encouraged me to get a doctorate in operations research. Eventually, their belief in me prevailed and I decided to pursue a PhD and the opportunity to lead important studies for the Army and Department of Defense. Regarding assignments, I often found out later that senior ORSAs had a hand in personally guiding my career, unbeknownst to me at the time. Their interest in me ensured that I remained in challenging and rewarding positions. What advice would you offer to young analysts? I’m a big believer in Teddy Roosevelt’s the “Man in the Arena.” Sometimes I even think of it as the “ORSA in the Arena.” Don’t be afraid to try something. If it doesn’t work, then you have learned something. Discovery comes from trying out different ideas. Don’t be afraid to be different and don’t be afraid to fail. But take risks wisely. Develop a group of trusted advisors that you can consult for advice,

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feedback, recommendations, and ideas. Use your group to evaluate the risk of the actions under consideration. Most of all, stand behind your colleagues and help set each other up for success. Who are your role models? I’ve had two groups of role models. They are all people that I could look up to and aspire to be like. Many were Army officers (Carolyn and Ralph Graves, Robert Holmes, Kenneth Guillory, Steve West, Mark Lewis, Steve Galing, Chuck Kaylor, Roy Wallace, Paul Thornton, and Steve Meddaugh) who modeled the principles of leadership and are morally and ethically strong. My other role models are professors (R.E.D. Woolsey, Karla Hoffman, David Schum, and Andy Loerch) who guided my studies, challenging me to strive to gain a deeper understanding of operations research and how theory and practical application fit together to yield new solutions. Most of all, each of my role models believed in me and encouraged me to reach for my goals.

WIM Community of Practice Website A compilation of female MORS oral histories, past articles on historical and contemporary female OR trailblazers, as well as links to some of their work, can be found on our WIM CoP website. We will be continuing to add to these, so please let us know if there is an analyst you’d like to see interviewed or someone from the history books you’d like to learn more about or that we should include.

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MORS Leads Gaming In the Pacific Dr. Ed McGrady and Mr. Timothy Wilke, Special Meeting Co-chairs

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argamers met in Hawaii from February 27 to March 1, 2023, at the MORS Wargaming with Partners and Allies conference to discuss wargaming, its application to the Pacific theater, and how it can be done to reinforce partnerships in the region. With more than 85 attendees, the conference is believed to have been the largest ever gathering of professional wargaming practitioners in Hawaii. It was just the right size for achieving its three goals: learning, discussing, and doing wargames. The learning portion of the conference featured more than 26 presentations on topics as varied as gaming humanitarian assistance operations to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in support of wargaming. The most wellattended sessions centered around AI and how it can be incorporated into wargames. Talks were divided into several general areas: the Pacific theater, game design, logistics in the Pacific, and gaming with partners and allies. The themes that emerged included: f How to better integrate Pacific theater games with both exercises and resourcing decisions, including how to apportion logistics resources between theaters. f Wargames and their role in understanding qualitative challenges. How do we analyze and visualize results from qualitative games? How do we use small, quick games to capture the character of complex humanitarian operations? How can confrontation analysis illuminate complicated dilemmas in international relations? f Innovative ways to use existing methodologies. A “triage” method for applying matrix-style adjudication

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to large multi-cell wargames was presented and discussed. This explored a popular adjudicative technique to nonkinetic issues in games beyond the scale at which it had previously been considered feasible. Another presentation focused on the combination of multiple methods to expand the measurement space for analysis in a softwaresupported distributed wargame. f New models and ways of integrating computers into wargames. This included using AI in wargames and simulations designed to capture the interrelationships between soft factors (opinion, population, leadership) and infrastructure. f Artificial intelligence and wargaming. AI encompasses a wide range of technologies and systems, so the question of how to integrate it into wargames is both varied and complicated. The subject of wargaming AI includes both how to represent AI systems within wargames and how AI can be used to support wargames. In the latter role, the Naval Postgraduate School is working on AI course of action systems to support designers, controllers, and players. This will be an ongoing conversation in the field. f Frameworks for applying wargaming within a broader analytic process. Presentations considered the ways wargaming fits into campaigns of learning and how best to apply wargames to analytic problems, as well as the potential for programs of experimental gaming. f The role of gaming in education, and the challenges of educating new gamers. Education was a major topic of discussion, enough to have its own track. We had a mix of educators, some focused on implementing wargames in professional military education, and

Back to Table of Contents others focused on building new capacity for game design. One theme was that games for education do not necessarily need to be as elaborate and complex as games for understanding or simulation, depending on the learning objectives. In the education space, games can employ more abstraction and game-like mechanics, in order to allow students to understand the basic interactions and relationships involved in the decision-making process. f New topics to be gamed, many nontraditional applications for wargames. One presentation described a set of games designed to educate participants from countries with border issues on topics related to highlevel verification and treaty monitoring. Others applied wargaming to humanitarian assistance, signaling with allies, and contested logistics. f Realism in games. The idea of contextual realism as presented by Dr. Ruby Booth of Sandia National Labs framed the problem of realism in games in terms of what should be left in a design, and what should be left out, when designing games that simulate reality. Things to consider include the faithfulness of the game to reality in order to convince the players of its realism. But this is traded off with the cognitive load required from players when the game becomes too complicated. This relationship between the complexity of a game and the cognitive load on its players was a recurring theme of conversation through the rest of the conference. The discussion section of the conference consisted of both panels and small group workshops known as the “Game Lab.” The four panels discussed game development and sponsors, wargaming in the Pacific, educating wargamers, and wargaming with partners. Discussions often divided along academic and practical lines, with panelists seeing progress on both fronts. The first panel considered a wide range of venues and methods utilized to fund and sponsor wargames, along with the challenges they can present to the field. One interesting line of discussion showcased how the role of games in political science and international relations work is increasing, and more and more social science techniques are being used to analyze game results. This resurgence in research gaming in academia often makes use of more repetitions of game play than is the case in other professional wargaming, approaching wargaming from an experimental model rather than an exploratory one. Building enough data allows for analysis of a range of

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variables such as experience, subject matter expertise, and other characteristics to be analyzed and assessed for how players participate in the game. The panel on the Pacific had participants from both in the theater and Washington. Unclassified gaming within the Washington-based policy community was described, comparing influential recent gaming efforts by think tanks looking at the theater and identifying key issues and assumptions between them. Several of these independent gaming efforts have converged on issues such as the difficulty of an extended campaign on Taiwan, the role of ground-based antiship capabilities, the benefits to China of an invasion in the south of Taiwan, and the relative irrelevance of military deterrence once a decision to invade has been made. The panel emphasized that the broader Washington policy community is gaming this theater and suggested that it might be useful to pay attention to the assumptions and outcomes of these efforts because they may very well affect policy within the Pentagon, Congress, and the administration. Throughout the conference, the role of logistics in the theater was discussed, with a defined track on logistics wargaming the first day. During the panel on the Pacific, participants reinforced the need to include logistics in games. The challenge is that there are different levels of logistics from operational to strategic. These involve different scopes, time scales, and issues such as logistics that require dealing with time, distance, and coordination in game mechanics. The education panel had leaders of wargaming programs from the Army War College, National Defense University, NATO, the Naval Postgraduate School, and MORS talk about how they structure classes to teach how to build wargames. The speakers emphasized the sheer diversity of the types of wargames that you can build, and the need for a range of classes designed to focus on the right kind of product for the students. Most programs center around a core of design and develop processes that give the students a basic framework for game design. Classes diverge in terms of the role that practical exercises and game playing has in teaching wargaming. While most classes discussed do have both lecture and laboratory portions, some focus on building a class project, while others use smaller exercises to get particular points across. Much of this depends on the overall objective for the class, and the subject matter being considered. The importance of educating wargamers was recently reinforced by calls for educating additional Department of

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Defense (DoD) wargamers. The audience and the panel had a lively discussion about how we should be doing that. This eventually evolved into a discussion of not only educating wargamers, but also employment opportunities, the role of experience, and how to retain wargamers once they are working. At a time of growing demand for wargames and the progress of many long-time wargamers toward retirement, the issue of training and retaining new wargamers will only rise in importance. This topic reemerged throughout the rest of the conference, including in the Game Lab sessions. Fortunately, there are many wargamers putting their minds toward this issue!

On the last day of the conference, players participated in games put on by various professional gaming organizations. The goal was to facilitate discussion about the mechanics, scenarios, and topics involved in the games, not to simply play the games for fun. However, most of the games quickly engaged the players while at the same time giving them new ideas that they could bring back to their own games. The presence of the designers of the games allowed participants to hear directly about game design decisions.

The panel on wargaming with partners discussed issues ranging from simulation support in such efforts to the use of gaming to represent the dynamics within an alliance. A project to help NATO staff officers discover how to operate in the complex decision-making environment of NATO Headquarters shows the promise for gaming techniques to replicate the internal workings of an alliance, providing the participants direct and immediately applicable insights.

f Joint Overmatch. This is a strategic warfighting game that employs novel mechanics to represent combat capabilities and logistics. Hosted by the Army War College.

The Game Lab involved participants in the conference proposing topics for small group discussions. Similar topics were consolidated and participants joined the group they were interested in for an hour or two of discussion. In a plenary session after the discussion, groups were given five to 10 minutes to present on their topic of choice. This simple technique yielded some of the most in-depth conversations of the conference.

f Eagle, Bear, and Dragon. Great power competition in Africa; Balance of Terror: counterterrorism; Ballot Boxing: Election Security. All of these games were hosted by the CIA.

Game Lab topics discussed at this conference included player diversity in strategy games, game return on investment in infrastructure, open source gaming’s role in cooperation and signaling, representing seabed infrastructure in games, non-DoD entities in games, machine learning and advanced analytics in game design, representing space assets in games, and gaming investment in allied and partner infrastructure. This represents a broad set of subjects that are of current interest to those attending the meeting, and participants were fully engaged in discussions. Taking the case of space gaming as an example, participants immediately divided the discussion into gaming space operations and including space operations in games. The former is the domain of detailed orbital and energy models and can be difficult to game at any but the highest classifications. On the other hand, including space operations in games allows room for abstraction, including the type and number of satellites, launch platforms, and control systems.

f Pacific/Indian Ocean Area Wargame Development. This was a game design workshop to build a game that would examine alternative technologies for logistics. This game was hosted by CANA.

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Games included:

f Signal. Signal is a nuclear signaling game that Sandia National Laboratory has been using to collect data on nuclear deterrence decision making, deterrence, and signaling. Hosted by Sandia National Laboratories.

f First Stop Pacific. This was a counter-narcotics wargame jointly designed by the Joint Interagency Task Force – South (JIATF-South) and the U.S. Naval Academy. Hosted by JIATF-South.

f A Balanced Fleet. The United Kingdom’s warship design course brought several games related to ship design and operations. One involved a fast-boat attack on a tanker protected by a corvette, while another presented as part of the games session was designed to test naval architect students’ designs against a realistic threat. This game was hosted by the UK Ministry of Defense and University College London. In summary, the attendees had a variety of ways to engage with learning, discussing, and doing games, and came away with new ideas, new ways to relate technology to games, and new mechanics and techniques for game construction. Even though we were in Hawaii, everyone was fully engaged with the conference, including the last day when most of the attendees focused on playing games, and ignored all of the other island distractions!

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Training Bulletin Certificate in Survey Process Dates: April 24–27, 2023. Location: Online

The Military Operations Research Society (MORS) offers opportunities for professional development and training via courses, tutorials, workshops, and the annual Symposium. Payment can be made via credit card, check, or form SF182.

Certificate in Wargaming Dates: April 17–21, 2023. Location: Online The MORS Certificate in Wargaming is a five-day course designed to enhance analyst capability and knowledge in multiple aspects of professional games, including research, design, development, execution, analysis, and reporting. Through a combination of lectures and exercises, participants will learn the theory behind wargames before diving into research design and execution. Building on Peter Perla’s theory of the “Architect, Artist, and Analyst” model for game designers, the course includes material that covers each style of wargame design. The course culminates in a practicum where participants will be divided into teams to develop and execute their own game for an assigned analytical problem.

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The MORS Certificate in Survey Process is a four-day course for all analysts seeking to gain a practical understanding in the various aspects of research survey methodology. The course will cover the basic principles of survey research and will provide participants with guidance in the design and execution of high-quality surveys.

Gaming Cyber and Information Operations Course Dates: May 22–24, 2023. Location: Online The MORS Gaming Cyber and Information Operations Short Course is a three-day course that focuses on building professional games designed to explore, train, or educate on issues surrounding cyber security and information operations. Oftentimes, cyber games are seen solely through the lens of computer-based games, and information operations games are thought to be too hard to execute and adjudicate. This course strives to dispel those beliefs and posits that manual games that focus on organization, conceptualization, and experimentation have a place in these spaces as well. The course will consist of three primary sections: game design, gaming cyber security at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, and gaming information operations. A combination of lectures and exercises will enhance the learning process.

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91st MORS Symposium

Designing Tactical Games Course

Dates: June 12–15, 2023. Location: West Point, NY

Dates: September 26-28, 2023. Location: Online

For more than 55 years, the annual MORS Symposium has been the premier opportunity for the national security community to exchange information, examine research, and discuss critical national security topics. Held in notable locations, the Symposium gathers more than 800 OR professionals from military, government, industry, and academic ranks to share best practices and enjoy a bit of well-deserved peer-to-peer networking in a supportive environment.

The MORS Designing Tactical Games Short Course is a threeday course that focuses on building tactical games. Tactical games deal with maneuver and combat during individual battles. This requires the game designer to manage large numbers of complex variables in ways that allow the players to make the appropriate warfighting decisions. Whether this is done using computer or manual techniques, it demands no small degree of simulation—the interaction of forces, the effects of human factors and technology, and the effects of the environment on combat. Any good wargame strives to produce realistic adjudications and outcomes, but the realism of tactical games is tested even more stringently because the players can more easily relate game mechanics and adjudication to their own personal experiences. All of this makes designing tactical games different—and even more challenging—than designing operational or strategic games. This class will examine some of these challenges and possible solutions in both theoretical and practical terms.

Beginning with the learning opportunities offered in the Monday tutorials and CEU courses, and followed by three information-packed days of working group sessions, the Symposium is an unequaled opportunity to stay current and get ahead. During the Symposium, work in progress and completed work are shared, and potential areas for future study are discussed. The Symposium is the venue to present, as well as be exposed to the most current OR trends and techniques.

Certificate in Excel Functions for Data Analysts Dates: September 12–14 and 19–20, 2023. Location: Online The MORS Certificate in Excel Functions for Data Analysts is a five-day course designed for beginner to mid-level analysts who wish to enhance their Excel skills and see what is new. Participants will learn how to conduct analysis and prepare briefs for decision makers using only Microsoft Office products. The course begins with the basics to provide a strong foundation, then builds up to a more in-depth look at various tools and functions within Excel. On the final day, participants will create and present a capstone project that combines everything they have learned throughout the week.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Sarah Madonia, Database & Administrative Assistant, at [email protected] or 703.933.9070.

During the first three days (Week 1), the course material is taught with in-course work and overnight homework to reinforce the material covered. Between weeks, a practice capstone project is presented to provide more opportunities to reinforce the material. Finally, during the last two days (Week 2) an actual capstone project is presented: the first day of Week 2, each student works the capstone project independently, while the second day, students are grouped into teams to present the results of the capstone to the instructors.

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PROFESSIONAL FEATURE

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Data Science: What Is It? How Is the Department of Defense Educating for It?

Dr. Mark A. Gallagher, Dr. Bradley Warner, Dr. Bruce Cox, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, and Col Judson Dressler

Introduction Whereas data science (DS) mostly overlaps the fields of operations research (OR), statistics, and computer science (CS), we contend that it is an emerging new field. Along with a unique blend of expertise, data scientists are developing a new and distinctive approach to addressing challenges with an approach of data first, then modeling. The Department of Defense (DoD) wants to exploit the military advantages of the information age brought on by inexpensive sensors and computer storage; however, the competition with industry for data scientists is challenging for the government and the DoD, in particular. Hence, the DoD needs to grow more of our own data scientists. As educators at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), we write based on our experience. We acknowledge and applaud the quality DS programs at the other service schools; however, we present mostly our perspectives from the Air Force. After identifying the necessary DS knowledge and skills, we have developed and continue to refine appropriate courses for our degree programs along with associated research. In this article, we define DS, its role

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in the military, and how our new degree programs support developing the data scientists needed within the DoD.

Defining Data Science DS is a field that involves using various techniques and tools to extract knowledge and insights from data. The algorithms are referred to as artificial intelligence (AI), which includes machine learning (ML). With inexpensive sensors and computer storage, the volume of available data is exploding. While DS is emerging, we recognized that the foundations for DS have been developed over decades in other fields, particularly OR. This new field is relevant to many different industries and organizations, including defense. The military uses DS to analyze data from various sources, such as surveillance footage, sensor readings, and communication networks, to gain valuable insights and make better-informed decisions. DS can contribute to improving military operations and tactics to include better understanding and responding to various situations and threats. Additionally, DS can improve military logistics, planning, and resource allocation, and can be used to develop more effective technologies and systems.

Back to Table of Contents In short, DS is a valuable field that can assist the DoD to be more effective and effcient in diverse applications across acquisitions, operations, and support. Figure 1 offers one possible view of the interrelation between DS and the related but arguably subdisciplines of data analytics, data engineering, AI, ML, and deep learning. An interesting and exciting aspect of DS is that the relationships within its own subdisciplines and with other disciplines have not been established. While consensus is developing, the DS ontology is not yet fixed. Some OR analysts say that DS is just a new term for their craft. Interestingly, some computer scientists also say DS is just another name for their expertise. However, operations researchers and computer scientists agree that their fields are different, so both their views on DS cannot be true. Similar arguments were made about OR when it was created as a distinct speciality. As OR was developing, some claimed it was just applied math, just statistics, just economics, just computer programming. The fallacy in these statement is the limiting word “just,” as OR is an amalgamation of the specialties. These arguments also missed the unique OR approach of focusing on problems and challenges.

PROFESSIONAL FEATURE

of Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) may be neglecting OR by describing itself as the professional society for “decision and data sciences” (INFORMS, 2022b). DS is unique from related specialities in two interrelated ways: its emphasis and approach, both of which focus on the data. We collected data on data scientists by searching job descriptions, degree offerings, and career advice. Our resulting affinity diagram for DS has four major areas: f Math and statistics f Software (analysis, design, and programming) f Data management (databases, hardware, security, wrangling, and visualization) f Algorithms (AI, including ML) The different approach of a data scientist compared to an OR analyst to the same problem is not apparent in lists of knowledge areas. OR analysts generally focus on the logic and relationships to construct a model and then search for data to parameterize their model. In contrast, data scientists search for all potentially relevant data first, and let the data drive the structure of their models. Both approaches seek to provide insights into issues. Furthermore, a particular analyst might apply either approach in a given situation. Breiman (2001) contains a

Some have constructed Venn diagrams to depict the relationships of these academic disciplines; however, these visualizations have Figure 1. One Venn diagram for data science. limitations. What is in or out is not clear. Both OR and DS use data, algorithms, and models; however, their emphases and approaches are very different. If along with OR, CS and statistics are included in the Venn diagram, no unique knowledge seems to remain for DS. Rather than defining the distinctions, we could take the approach of combining names like the Army, aggregating OR and system analysis into ORSAs. One Army officer perceives better alignment between OR with system engineering and between statistics and DS. If we combine OR and DS, do we become DSORs or ORDSs? In seeking name appeal, the Institute

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provocative professional discussion among statisticians about these two cultures. Every specialty has some unique knowledge. OR claimed being distinct based on mathematical programming and simulation. Similar to OR, DS is a blend across current disciplines with its own unique twist of data first—explore the data to construct models rather than build models and parameterize them based on data. INFORMS characterizes this distinction as data-centric versus problem-centric approaches (INFORMS, 2022a). As we subsequently show, the education of DS differs from OR.

The DoD Demand for Data Scientists The DoD may not know how to define DS, but they know they want it. The DoD established the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) in 2018 to seize upon the transformative potential of AI technology for the benefit of America’s national security (Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, 2019). By 2020, the DoD and each military service created a position of chief data officer. The new Space Force intends to be a “digital service” to accelerate innovation. On June 22, 2021, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks announced the creation of the DoD AI and Data Acceleration initiative, or ADA initiative. She stated, “its goal is to rapidly advance data and AI dependent concepts, like joint all-domain command and control, . . . [to] generate foundational capabilities through a series of implementation experiments or exercises, each one purposefully building understanding through successive and incremental learning” (Terri Moon Cronk, 2022). In April 2022, the DoD hired Dr. Craig Martell, a former CS professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and previously head of ML for Lyft, as chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. He is responsible for accelerating the adoption of data, analytics, digital solutions, and AI functions. Hicks says that Dr. Martell’s role is to improve the exploitation and analysis of the data (Lopez, 2022). Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist published the “DoD Data Strategy” in September of 2020 in which one of the four essential capabilities listed is talent: service members and civilians empowered to use data empowering operations (Norquist, 2020). However, the demand for data scientists goes well beyond the documented and overwhelmingly enthusiastic sentiments of our senior leaders. Data scientists, at the operational and tactical

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level, are a must for the DoD’s desperately needed digital transformation. The basic idea of a digital transformation rests on the foundation of data. The concepts of data architecture, data platforms, data fabrics, etc., are hollow unless the expertise to wield these tools is established from the onset. The principles underpinning DS go beyond the profession of a data scientist. Never before has there been a need for the democratization of “data” understanding. Just as a Marine is first and foremost a rifleman, the job of our future military member may become first and foremost one of a data collector. Across disparate career fields and functions, we need to develop and implement data tools. We need our data scientists to work alongside our subject matter experts to act as translators and integrators across all systems to bring about a mature and properly connected ecosystem. We contend that DoD needs data scientists who are versed in foundational data architectures and principles yet equally capable of grasping basic operational and tactical needs from across career fields. The era of systems integration is upon us and crucial to our success in this era is a strong core of data scientists. However, the ability to recruit high-end data scientists is extremely challenging with their many opportunities across the private and public sectors (Cronk, 2022). While the DoD can contract for DS support, the government needs military and civilian experts who understand this critical and integrating field. Therefore, the DoD needs to be able to grow our own data scientists.

The Education of Data Scientists at Military Schools The military academies, along with the two DoD graduate schools, have responded to the need to educate data scientists. Let’s quickly review the purpose of degrees at different levels. The bachelor or undergraduate degree provides a broad education foundation with a major that introduces the student to a particular field. A classical education prepares the students for life. A Bachelor of Science (BS) is more technically oriented. The Master of Science (MS) degree educates experts in their discipline. The PhD is a research degree. The course work ensures a solid foundation, and the research has the candidate demonstrate the ability to advance knowledge. We compare our DS degrees with OR degrees for the MORS

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Earn exposure, memberships, advertising and more! MORS offers your organization continuous visibility and access within the worldwide military operations research and national security analytic communities. Benefits can include: (Depending on level) ` Up to 12 individual MORS memberships per year ` 5, 30-day online job postings . (a $1,495 value) ` 2 Symposium registrations per year ` 4, full-color ads per year in the . Phalanx which has a . circulation of 1,200 and a . readership of 6,000 ` Free exhibits at select . MORS events

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Continued from page 22

audience, admitting these programs also have overlap with the CS and statistics degrees.

USAF Academy Degree in DS In April 2020, the Air Force Academy introduced an undergraduate major in DS, which was designed to equip students with the skills needed to plan for, acquire, manage, analyze, and draw inferences from data. The major is administered by the DS Board (DSB) and is offered through the Departments of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Management, and Mathematical Sciences. It focuses on critical thinking and problem solving within the context of data-driven decision making and draws from the fields of mathematics, statistics, CS, and information science. The first cohort of DS majors, consisting of 30 cadets, will graduate in 2023. In addition to creating the DS major, USAFA has also redesigned its math core sequence to educate all cadets in data literacy while also meeting the needs of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. The core curriculum now includes multivariate differential and integral calculus courses that focus on computational methods using the R programming environment, as well as statistics courses that focus on data acquisition, wrangling, exploratory analysis, computational inference, and regression. The DS program at USAFA is based on the guidance published in the Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science by the Park City Math Institute (PCMI), a committee of 25 undergraduate faculty from mathematics, statistics, and CS disciplines funded by the National Science Foundation (De Veaux et al., 2017). The key elements of the program are a mix of statistical methods, CS concepts, ethics, and a domain area of expertise. In the domain focus track, students complete a twocourse sequence of six semester hours that emphasizes learning the domain background knowledge and applying DS techniques to problem solving, decision making, and/ or persuasive argument in a specific discipline. Students can choose courses from any department, and some common tracks include sports analytics, cybersecurity, and econometrics, as well in disciplines such as philosophy, digital humanities, and political science. The focus track

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provides students with the opportunity to apply their DS skills to an elective discipline of their choice. We now highlight the key differences and similarities between OR and DS majors at USAFA. The OR degree focuses on mathematical models and tools, whereas DS has an emphasis on data and computation. Table 1 provides a summary of these ideas with respect to the courses taken. Table 1. USAFA degree required courses. Data science Data Structures

Common courses

Operations research

Linear Algebra

Econometrics I & II

Information Storage Computational and Retrieval Prob & Stats

Discrete Computer Simulation

Ethics and Technology

Machine Learning

Linear Programming

Business Data Analytics

Computer Programming (Python)

Stochastic Modeling

Artificial Intelligence

Optimization Theory

Domain Emphasis Track I & II

Calculus III

. The DS major is an exciting and challenging new addition to USAFA. Successful students typically demonstrate intellectual curiosity along with strong quantitative and communication skills. Graduates of the DS program will have attained the following outcomes (USAFA, 2022): f An understanding of and ability to apply the following DS concepts, tools, and methods to data analysis pipelines: »

Data acquisition

»

Data preprocessing

»

Exploratory data analysis

»

Inferential and predictive thinking, modeling, and analysis

»

Computational thinking, data structures, and algorithms

f An understanding of ethical, legal, societal, and economic concerns in application of DS concepts f An ability to visualize, interpret, and communicate the output of data analysis pipelines to stakeholders f An ability to function on multidisciplinary teams using DS concepts and tools

Back to Table of Contents Cadets majoring in DS at USAFA have the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of internships and research projects with both the DoD and industry partners. These projects provide cadets with the opportunity to develop and apply their skills and knowledge in a range of areas. Some examples of past summer programs include: f Developing Python libraries for constructing quantum neural networks (supported by Amazon Web Services, ML Solutions Lab) f Creating a data engineering pipeline to ingest, normalize, tag, and export cyber analytics data in a state ready for AI/ML import (supported by Air Combat Command) f Identifying data anomalies for NGA/DLA catalogs; setting up data pipeline for map flow with an ML approval tool (supported by National GeospatialIntelligence Agency) f Developing an AI for T-6 simulator (Maneuver ID Challenge from MIT AI Accelerator Lab) (supported by AFIT) In addition, some capstone research activities include:

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f Demonstrate host-based ML analytic for cyber threat hunting (supported by Air Combat Command) f Develop data pipeline and predictive models to support FalconSatX (supported by USAFA Department of Astronautics Capstone) f Support ecology research on USAFA with statistical analysis and development/deployment of image classifier (supported by USAFA Department of Biology) f Adversarial ML – disrupting Gaussian Bayesian networks (supported by USAFA Department of Mathematical Sciences) f Explore and improve the existing DoD model for basic allowance for housing (supported by Secretary of the Air Force, Studies and Analysis) The United States Naval Academy (USNA) and the United States Military Academy (USMA) also offer DS majors. The Naval Academy CS department has initiated a DS major. Midshipmen in this major, after establishing a foundation in probability, statistics, and practical computer programming skills, take several electives from a range of departments to apply their data expertise to individual domains of

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interest. The USMA mathematical sciences department offers cadets an applied statistics and DS major. The DS portion expands on statistics to encompass the entire life cycle of data, from its specification, gathering, and cleaning through its management and analysis, to its use in making decisions and setting policy. These three military academies highlight the slightly different perspectives of DS discussed at the beginning of this article. The Naval Academy has its DS degree in the CS department, whereas their OR degree is in the math department. West Point has its DS program within the math department with the OR degree. The Air Force Academy has interdepartmental oversight from the math, CS, and management departments, which is very similar to the organization for its OR degree. However, regardless of the department in which DS resides, we agree that DS is combination of CS and OR including math and statistics. Additionally, we further agree that DS has a unique focus on extracting information from the data.

DoD Graduate Education in DS NPS has included a track on data analytics in its inresidence management science and operations research (MSOR) degree for the past 10 years. Students who complete this track currently receive an additional academic certificate in DS. Since 2018, NPS has also offered a distance learning certificate in DS jointly from its OR and CS departments. The educational skills requirements are computation, statistics and data analysis, large data, ML, assessment, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and practice. Alderson (2022) provides details about the underlying philosophy and organization of these offerings. AFIT is educating military and civilian data scientists within the Air Force, Space Force, and sister services. AFIT created an academic specialty code for DS (OCCE) so units may code their billets to require this education and so data scientists serving in the Air Force may be easily identified. AFIT offers through distance learning a data analytics certificate open for individuals with any undergraduate degree. The five distance learning courses are data analytics, data and databases, ML, statistics, and computer programming with Python. The focus of these courses are learning how to apply DS techniques. Furthermore, the AFIT Department of Operational Sciences initiated a Master of Science (MS) in DS program starting in September 2021. This 18-month in-residence program’s

26 — PHALANX • SPRING 2023

core courses provide the desired mathematical and statistical foundations, along with an education in data engineering and AI/ML algorithms. Table 2 shows the AFIT required courses for the MS in DS and MS in OR have half in common. The DS program electives enable graduate students to explore diverse topics, such as computer vision, data wrangling, text mining, and reinforcement learning. The thesis research hones their skills to address real DoD challenges using and exploiting data for better performance. Table 2. AFIT MS degree required courses. Data science

Common courses

Operations research

Heuristics

Linear Algebra

Math Programming

Database

Probability & Statistics

Discrete Event Simulation

Data Architecture

Empirical Modeling

Linear Programming

Machine Learning II

Machine Learning I

Stochastic Modeling

. Personnel with various backgrounds need to learn how to exploit data in their diverse fields. The department has tailored the program so students from different disciplines may obtain the DS expertise to apply in their career fields. Prospective students with a technical undergraduate education and computer programming skills are welcome to apply for the DS degree. The first cohort in the AFIT MS DS degree started in September 2021 and graduated in March 2023. These seven officers span the career fields of OR analysts, cyber operations, and engineering. Additional Wright-Patterson Air Force Base civilian and military part-time students are pursuing this degree. In today’s fast-paced, informationdense warfare, all occupational fields are inundated with data; thus, technical experts from diverse backgrounds benefit from this data-centric education. Beginning with the thesis research from its first cohort, AFIT is developing numerous lines of AI, DS, and ML research. Current research spans data from medical, contracts, Twitter, simulations, and target images. Figure 2 shows that these topics also span the gamut of the branches of ML with several reinforcement learning topics, many supervised learning topics leveraging labeled data, and even a big data topic focused on discovering hidden trends within contracting data.

Continued on page 28

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Continued from page 26

AFIT medical research aimed at the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease leverages a mobile phone application that collects multiple modalities of data via users’ interactions with the mobile device. Along with the development of new ML algorithms to process the data, the mobile app can track cognitive decline. Associated research is branching out to predict the outcomes of traumatic brain injuries. Several research projects have leveraged open source Twitter data to characterize the sentiment of foreign language tweets in order to gauge, in real-time, changes in a population’s sentiment. These approaches leverage a mixture of various types of modern neural networks and have been shown to outperform the prior standard. Research in autonomous drones, drone swarms, and automated dog fighting leverage a mixture of reinforcement learning and modern simulation software. This research is paving the way for the next generation of autonomous or semi-autonomous fighters. The AFIT Department of Operational Sciences continues to grow this vital data capability, and recently hired a new faculty to provide data engineering expertise. We are initiating a PhD in DS. As we have designed the MS in DS to enable students with various technical undergraduate degrees to be successful in the program, we have constructed the PhD in DS for students from various disciplines.

Table 3. AFIT PhD program requirements. Data science

Operations research

Theory of Probability

Math Analysis

(2 courses)

Mathematical Statistics

Linear Algebra

Specialties

Applied Statistics

Applied Statistics

(1 course in each category)

Machine Learning

Optimization

Algorithmic Implementation

Stochastic Modeling

Math Requirement

Data Engineering

Table 3 shows the areas of required courses in the PhDs for DS and OR. Each specialty area consists of several courses at different levels. Students take specialty courses that advance their knowledge from their prior education. This approach enables engineers and scientists to be educated in DS and apply that knowledge in their various domains. We are acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of DS and the need for vast and disparate need for DS expertise.

Conclusions The world is changing with rapid growth in available data that can greatly improve our effectiveness and efficiency. While challenged to compete with the private sector and the rest of the public sector, the DoD needs more data scientists. The military academies and graduate schools are adapting to prepare our military and civilians for their DS challenges. You can participate in many ways, for example,

Figure 2. Mapping of current AFIT DS topics to the three branches of machine learning.

28 — PHALANX • SPRING 2023

Simulation

Back to Table of Contents by becoming educated, mentoring, requesting data scientists, and sponsoring DS research. Individuals should prepare to contribute to this expanding future for data scientists. Seek DS education opportunities through short courses, undergraduate programs at the academies, and civilian universities including Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs. Military and civilians with undergraduate degrees may consider the online NPS DS certificate or AFIT Master of Analytics. The AFIT DS degree programs are in-residence. Military officers should request them through their career field managers. For civilians, the Air Force has career broadeners that include attending AFIT. DoD civilians, military, and contractors at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base may enroll part-time or full-time as their supervisor approves. Civilians students may apply through Palace Acquire intern programs or the DoD’s Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarships. You may have to be the first to request a new approach to obtain DS education. Even if you are not a potential student, please mentor those you meet. Our defense department and nation has an increasing need for technical educated adults.

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References Alderson, D. L. 2022. Interactive Computing for Accelerated Learning in Computation and Data Science, INFORMS Transactions on Education, Vol 22, 130–145. https:// pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/ited.2021.0261. Breiman, L. 2001. Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (with comments and a rejoinder by the author), Statistical Science, Vol 16, 199–231. Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. 2019. The JAIC Story. https://www.ai.mil/about.html. Cronk, T. M. 2022. Hicks Announces New Artificial Intelligence Initiative. DoD News, https://www.defense.gov/News/ News-Stories/Article/Article/2667212/. De Veaux, R., Agarwal, M., Averett, M. et al. 2017. Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science, Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application Vol 4, 15–30. https://www.annualreviews.org/ doi/10.1146/annurev-statistics-060116-053930. Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). 2022a. Data- and Problem-Centric Approaches. OR/MS Tomorrow, https://www.informs. org/Publications/OR-MS-Tomorrow/Promo-Folder/ Featured-Story-One-ORMS-Tomorrow/. Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). 2022b. Discover INFORMS. https://www. informs.org/Discover.

Most of you are encountering challenges that could be better addressed with DS techniques. Managers can code their billets to require DS education (OCCE for the Air Force and 1560 for civilian positions). Besides having qualified officers assigned to your units, you send a demand signal for the schools to prioritize DS education. Managers can also mentor subordinates to pursue DS education and positions. Defense managers may sponsor DS research projects at DoD schools. Career fields managers should think about how data is used in your area of expertise. How many officers and civilians within your specialty should be educated to exploit that data? Every career field should have at least a few data scientists. Dataintensive career fields, including finance, personnel, and logistics, should have a significant portion of the officers and civilians educated in DS. In conclusion, as OR has and continues to enable many improvements to our society and military, DS has a similar potential in this information age.

Author Statement This article reflects the views of the authors and may not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any of its organizations.

PHALANX • SPRING 2023 — 29

PROFESSIONAL FEATURE

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References (continued) Lopez, C. T. 2022. Leadership Key to Moving Defense Department Toward Data-Driven Future. DoD News, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/ Article/3059694/. Norquist, D. L. 2020. DoD Data Strategy. https://media. defense.gov/2020/Oct/08/2002514180/-1/-1/0/DODDATA-STRATEGY.PDF. U.S. Air Force Academy. 2022. Data Science. https://www. usafa.edu/academic/data-science/.

About the Authors Mark Gallagher, PhD, FS, is the first and only Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) Professor of Practice. Mark worked to establish and became the program director for the AFIT Master of Science in Data Science. MORS has recognized Mark with the Barchi Prize (twice), Rist Prize (twice), Fellow of the Society, and Thomas Award. Mark is an Air Force Academy graduate with majors in operations research and computer science and an AFIT graduate in OR MS and their first OR PhD. Mark has led the creation of several models in his career, including the Weapons Assignment Model (WAM) for nuclear forces and more recently the Bilateral Enterprise Analysis Model (BEAM) to investigate joint campaign strategies and force structures. Bradley Warner, PhD, is a professor of applied statistics at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). He led the team to create and became the program director of the USAFA Bachelor of Science in Data Science program. He received his undergraduate degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. In 1996, he received his PhD in biometrics from the University of Colorado, Health Sciences Center. He also holds a Master of Science degree from the Colorado School of Mines in mathematical and computer sciences. His research interests include machine learning, neural networks, and statistical pedagogy. He has been on the USAFA faculty since 1996. He has held many leadership roles in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, to include Engineering Division Chief, Operations Research Division Chief, Deputy Department Head for Academics, Director of Innovation, and Department Head. Prior to his work at the Air Force Academy, he

30 — PHALANX • SPRING 2023

was a submarine qualified naval officer and then a product development engineer for Siecor, a leading manufacturer of fiber optic cables. He holds a United States patent. Bruce Cox, PhD, is an assistant professor of data science at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). He is transitioning into the role of program director for the AFIT Masters of Science in Data Science. He earned his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Operations Research, with a focus in large-scale optimization. His teaching and research focus is on data-driven decision making though machine learning, heuristics, and robust optimization. Prior to his work at the Air Force Institute of Technology, he served as an operations research analyst in the Air Force, working at Air staff on personal analysis, as well as positions performing operational testing of space systems and logistical analysis. He has also deployed to a combined joint billet as a geo-intelligence analyst in Afghanistan, and to Qatar to perform analysis in the combined air operations center. Col Tucker Hamilton is the Department of the Air Force’s Chief of AI Test and Operations. In this role, he oversees the governance of AI-enabled system testing and drives guidance on AI operations. Additionally, he’s the 96th Operations Group Commander and oversees flight tests of numerous platforms, including the military’s first Collaborative Combat Autonomous aircraft. Colonel Judson Dressler, PhD, is the permanent professor and head of the Department of Computer and Cyber Sciences at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the Air Force Academy, MS in computer science from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and his PhD in computer science from Rice University. Jud led the creation of the Air Force’s Advanced Cyber Schoolhouse, the Cyber Science degree program at USAFA, and was the Commander of the 835th Cyberspace Operations Squadron where he led three cyber protection teams in threat-focused, intelligence-driven defensive cyberspace operations for the Air Force. His research interests include cyber security, digital forensics, machine learning, and neural networks.

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Book Review

How Important Are Superior Numbers? A Reappraisal of Lanchester’s Square Law By David L. I. Kirkpatrick Reviewed by Dr. Brian McCue

I

n How Important Are Superior Numbers? A Reappraisal of Lanchester’s Square Law (third in the Cambridge University Press “Elements in Defence Economics” series, 2021), David L. I. Kirkpatrick takes on the challenge of empirically testing Lanchester’s “Square Law,” using historical cases. As Kirkpatrick describes, the early 20th-century aeronautical engineer and polymath F. W. Lanchester posited an abstract model of warfare in which each side, Red and Blue, eroded the other in proportion to its own numerical strength and a quality constant. Thus, he had R’ = –b ∙ B B’ = –r ∙ R where uppercase R and B are the numbers of Red and Blue forces, the lowercase b and r are their unchanging per-unit qualities, and the primes denote derivatives with respect to time. Thus, the lowercase variables represent the quality of the forces, while the uppercase variables represent their quantity. The essential point is that the fighting is, as Lanchester had it, “collective”: each unit can always shoot at any unit on the other side. The rare reader who has not encountered these equations before should imagine forces of riflemen lined up and shooting at one another, with each surviving Blue soldier able to eliminate b Red soldiers per unit of time, and each Red soldier likewise destroying r of their Blue enemies in each unit of time. Such a reader

32 — PHALANX • SPRING 2023

might also want to recall the course in differential equations and take a few moments to apply “separation of variables,” integrate, and show that the difference bB2 – rR2 remains constant even as Red and Blue erode one another.1 Departing from the usual course of Lanchester’s derivation, but not from its spirit nor from the truths of the introductory course in differential equations, Kirkpatrick solves this system to show that Blue Attrition = (r ∙ R2/b ∙ B2) Red Attrition, where “attrition” is defined as losses in proportion to original force size, the boldface uppercase variables are the initial quantities of the forces, and b and r are their per-unit qualities as before. Kirkpatrick identifies this solution as Lanchester’s celebrated “Square Law,” in which the uppercase bold initial quantities, because they are squared, are seen as more important than unexponentiated lowercase quality variables b and r. Perhaps the reason for Kirkpatrick’s unusual derivation can be found in his next step, which is to note that log (Red Losses / Blue Losses) = log (r/b) – log (B/R), 1.

As Kirkpatrick mentions, Lanchester also propounded a Linear Law, in which other assumptions led to the more intuitive bB and rR as expressions of the side’s strengths, but without the squaring it does not feed the belief that quantity is more important than quality, and thus plays no role in Kirkpatrick’s investigation.

Back to Table of Contents a formulation that is well-suited to validation attempts conducted on log-log plots, inasmuch as logged loss ratios of a set of truly Lanchestrian combats, conducted with the same r and b but starting at different abcissas of log(B/R), will plot as a straight line, with a y-intercept at log(r/b) and a slope of –1. Kirkpatrick embarks upon his validation efforts with due deliberation, seeking epochs of war in which the assumptions of Lanchester’s Square Law where collective direct fire combat were likely to be satisfied. He settles on the American Civil War as the most promising. The Napoleonic wars receive due consideration, but are rejected, largely because of the confounding presence of unengaged reserves who increase their side’s numbers without increasing the other side’s losses, as well as the important and complex role of cavalry. Kirkpatrick maintains that by the American Civil War, cavalry had lost its role as a producer of casualties in the main battle. In return, he attempts to remove from the list of losses the troops killed or taken prisoner in post-battle pursuit, which might well have featured cavalry. He applies such adjustments to canonical box scores of American Civil War battle data originally compiled by

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Livermore, and then tests the Lanchester-ness of the battles by making the log-log plot described above and shown in Figure 1, in which each battle is a point. In this regard, and, in fact, overall, the presentation is excellent: the text describes the various adjustments and the needs for them, but the details are contained in appendices so as to avoid interrupting the reader’s flow. Kirkpatrick finds that his selected American Civil War battles conform to Lanchester, or at least that they conform better than do the battles from the other wars such as those of Napoleon, if one counts only the engaged strengths and not the reserves, those that did not arrive in time. He ascribes this conformity to the Civil War battles’ relatively homogeneous forces with artillery and cavalry playing less of a role than before or since, and to the collective nature of the infantry engagements. As he might have pointed out, these circumstances are the same as those specified by Lanchester in setting the conditions for his Square Law. The idea of reducing the battles to a plot in the log-log plane is a good one, and the reader is likely to agree with Kirkpatrick’s by-eye judgements as to which battles fit well and which do not. However, one is left to wish for

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some kind of formal Fisher-type significance testing, under which conformity to the Square Law would be treated as the null hypothesis, and any rejection of the Square Law would be stated in terms of the observed departures’ low probability of occurring by chance alone, were the law to be true. The situation does not satisfy the conditions of conventional least-squares regression, so textbook methods cannot be used. A tailor-made method would be a notable methodological step forward, but it might require starting from scratch and treating the Lanchester battle as a stochastic process.

Figure 1. Plot of American Civil War battles’ conformity to Lanchester (Kirkpatrick’s figure 2)

Kirkpatrick’s perspective is that of the defense economist: in acquiring military forces, one is almost always faced with the trade-off between quality and quantity. Those who would insist on buying the best are countered by those who see numbers as important, too, and Kirkpatrick asserts that those in the latter group “frequently” appeal to Lanchester’s Square Law in support of their position. The only instance he cites is the saying, attributed to Stalin, that “quantity has a quality all its own.” Unfortunately, this attribution is without scholarly support, and in no account is Stalin said to be referring particularly to Lanchester. However, Kirkpatrick is undoubtedly correct that casual and informal appeals to Lanchester abound, and he is also right that many of those who toss around the notion of the Square Law are unfamiliar with its particulars and its limitations. To be sure, and as the present reviewer can attest, handwaving allusions to Lanchester’s Square Law occurred often in Cold War procurement debates, and Square Lawcompatible outcomes commonly appear in wargames, computer simulations, and field experiments to this day. The Square Law is attractive in that it provides a score that is independent of the other side’s forces, but one is hardpressed to find a case in which the Law has seen explicit quantitative use in any official proceeding. One reason for the reluctance of decision makers to seek superiority in numbers or in quantity rather than quality may be that to do so is to opt for greater losses in the event that the envisioned war actually occurs. The newcomer to Lanchester is invited to follow along with pen, pad, calculator, and the knowledge that bB2 – rR2 remains constant throughout any one Lanchester engagement as we suppose that Blue faces a threat of 1,000 Red entities of some kind such as fighter aircraft, each of unit quality, and plans in terms of a decisive battle scenario in which the two forces’ entire procurements will meet and engage in a combat governed by the Square

34 — PHALANX • SPRING 2023

Law. Red’s Square Law strength is a million, which Blue proposes to counter with a force whose unit quality is 4. Five hundred such Blues are needed to match Red’s Square Law strength: 4 ∙ 5002 = 1 ∙ 1,0002. Then somebody cites Lanchester and says that there’s strength in numbers. Kirkpatrick quotes Norman Augustine to the effect that a 10% increase in performance comes at the expense of a 33% increase in individual cost. On this basis, Blue proposes to go down two “Augustine factors” of 1.1 in quality and 1.333 in price and, for the same money as the 500 units of quality 4 would have cost, buy 889 platforms with a quality of 3.3. This force’s Lanchester . score of 3.3 ∙ 8892 = 2,611,717 is a big improvement and is enough superior to the Red force that Blue can win the decisive battle and have 384 survivors. Or, for what the 500-strong force would have cost, Blue could buy just 551 items of quality 3.3 and create a Lanchester tie: 3.3 ∙ 5512 = 1,003,640 ≈ 1 ∙ 1,0002. This is the Lanchester-based argument that Kirkpatrick imputes to planners and politicians, but it has a dark side: the more Blue takes advantage of the squaring, the more

Continued on page 36

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Continued from page 34

Blue loses if the fight ever takes place. Of the original 500 platforms, all would have been lost in the defeat of Red. The lesser-quality 889 platforms would wipe Red out too, but 504 would be lost. The cheaper force of 551 would defeat Red as well, but at a loss of 532 platforms. In the United States, at any rate, advocates of low-cost, high-number systems are seldom willing to acknowledge the higher losses that these systems will, at least in the “for planning purposes only” world of Lanchester, take. We return now to Kirkpatrick’s study of historical cases. In the likely event that the battles’ conformity to the Square Law fails a statistic test, Kirkpatrick would then need to find a way to argue that the outcomes were in fact close, allowing not only for the vagaries of chance, but also for the timing of the forces’ engagements, the roles of artillery, cavalry, terrain, etc. Some of these considerations had been raised, and to a degree addressed, by the enigmatic Russian author M. Osipov, whose 1915 treatise The Influence of the Numerical Strength of Engaged Forces on Their Casualties (Helmbold and Rehm, 1991) basically coincided with Lanchester’s 1915 publication of the Square Law (in the British journal Engineering, October 2, 1914, per Helmbold and Rehm, 1991), though it did predate the appearance of Lanchester’s 1916 book Aircraft in Warfare. Kirkpatrick does not mention Osipov, or others, including Rear Admirals Bradley A. Fiske and Jehu Valentine Chase, who predated Lanchester and Osipov,2 but whose priority was not recognized until later.3 He does make most of the expected references to the post-WW II Lanchester literature, such as the works of J.H. Engel, J. Fain, and H.K. Weiss. The Napoleonic case, and most others, contain the major complication that each side may possess entities of differing qualities as well as quantities, and of differing vulnerability to enemy fire: infantry and artillery, or, in the modern day, some troops armed with rifles and some with machine guns not to mention tanks. Osipov takes this challenge on but Kirkpatrick simply recognizes the possibility and does his best to avoid cases in which it might matter. (Lanchester’s own attempted treatment of inhomogeneity was not his finest moment.) The 2.

3.

Osipov uses Napoleonic examples and seemingly finds them more favorable to Lanchester than does Kirkpatrick. He also attempts a significance calculation, but it leaves room for improvement. See Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics, USNIP, various editions.

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fundamental trouble with such cases is that each side, or the analyst presiding over the calculation, must decide how each side’s disparate force elements are best allocated against the other’s. These interdependent allocations may change as the two sides erode one another, and the specter of game theory arises. Careers have been spent in trying to solve this problem and any success is vulnerable to the complaint that the analyst, with his or her “assumption of rationality,” has outperformed the capabilities of real-world decision makers. Kirkpatrick seems to deliver a verdict of “not proven” on the Square Law: he finds that it fits certain historical cases to which Lanchester’s assumptions apply but warns that it is not suitable as a broad policy guide to procurement. However, to make this judgement stick, he would need to rebut others’ claims to have validated the Square Law. These include J.H. Engel, whom Kirkpatrick merely mentions; his paper “A Verification of Lanchester’s Law” begins with the statement “The validity of Lanchester’s equations is demonstrated in an actual combat situation where US forces captured the island of Iwo Jima.” Its 1954 date of publication positioned it well for becoming a primary reference for Cold War analysts who wished to cite proof of the Square Law, and the supposed corollary that quantity is more important than quality. Finally, neither Kirkpatrick nor any of Lanchester’s numerous latter-day commentators have addressed a fundamental premise: is quantity really more important, just because its term is squared? We do not look at the expression for electrical power loss (i2R) and say that the current is more important for being squared: surely current (i) and resistance (R) are on equal footing as important constituents of power loss. So why are r and R not on an equal footing in the Lanchester expression rR2?

References Helmbold, Robert L., and Rehm, Allan S. 1991. The Influence of the Numerical Strength of Engaged Forces on Their Casualties. U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, available at DTIC as AD-A241 534. https://apps.dtic. mil/sti/pdfs/ADA241534.pdf.

About the Author Dr. Brian McCue is the author of the recent book Beyond Lanchester: Stochastic Granular Attrition Processes. This review constitutes his own opinions and is not a product of the Center for Naval Analyses.

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Exciting New

Infoscitex Opportunity at

Marine Corps

Base Quantico

IST is assembling a team of Modeling and Simulation Specialists experienced in creating military models, scenarios, and wargames using the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM). The team is based in a new state-of-the-art facility at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) in Quantico, Virginia.

Are you an AFSIM specialist with proven capability modeling high fidelity systems, including multi-domain platforms, sensors, communications, weapons, and command and control networks? Do you want to…  Collaborate with USMC warfighters and international partners in developing operationally relevant scenarios to investigate current and future capabilities?  Exercise skills in logical scripting by writing behaviors to govern interactions between entities and create custom observers to harvest AFSIM data output to inform key decision makers?  Directly aid USMC warfighters through live-force experimentation enhanced by modeling and simulation studies in logistics, cyber warfare, and cross domain operations?  Be on the bleeding edge as part of a fast-paced, responsive crew passionate about this high-visibility technology? Begin your application by scanning the QR code.

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Military Operations Research Society Publications Committee Professional Reading List 2023 The MORS professional reading list recommends exceptional publications of relevant readings on national defense, military operations, and operations research practices. Suggestions come from senior MORSians who spend considerable time reviewing historical underpinnings and current issues facing the analytic community. Recommendations include commentary on content, quality, and material impact.

Dupuy, Colonel Trevor N. The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare. Da Capo Press: New York, NY, 1984 reprinted in 1990, 350 pps. This is a most interesting book that describes the development of weapons throughout the ages and the essential doctrine, tactics, logistics, and organizational requirements that support battlefield employment. Dupuy created a historical treasure with great insights on how the most famous military leaders created success with the innovative weapons of their age. A deep and thought provoking read for warriors, weapon designers, and combat developers. (M. W. Garrambone)

other supplies to the remote Alert Air Station, crashed less than 11 miles from the airfield. This was the first major air disaster faced by the Canadian Forces Search and Rescue (SAR) units and this book provides illuminating accounts of the challenges pilots, rescue control centers, SAR techs, and survivors faced during the 35-hour rescue mission. All visitors to the Polar regions should read this book. . (D. R. Erbschloe)

Kline, Gary A. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. (20th anniversary edition) MIT Press: Boston, MA, 2017, 332 pps. Kline knows you will spend your entire life making decisions and succinctly explains the mental methodologies used to guide the process. He provides the rationale behind the tools of intuition, simulation, projection, vision, and narrative in making the call and adds the power of team thought and scientific analysis to the mix. Fifty thousand copies and six language translations underscore its value in understanding the mind mechanism of the decision maker. (T. C. Hughes)

Barno, David, and Nora Bensahel. Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime. Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2020, 430 pps. The authors claim it will be difficult to prepare for war because it will be shaped by the complexities of rapidly evolving technologies and expansion of battlespace killing systems. Success will be determined by the war fighters’ ability to recognize what is happening as events unfold and their ability to rapidly adapt to the fight while under fire. This book identifies those who were able to adapt under fire leading to success, and those who failed to adapt and endured the disastrous consequences that followed. A book for those who seek to understand the key factors that influence war outcome. . (E. P. Negrelli)

Lee, Robert M. Death and Deliverance: The True Story of an Airplane Crash at the North Pole. Fulcrum Publishing: Golden, Colorado, 1993, 271 pps. Lee provides the true story of the Box Top 22, the Canadian aircraft that crashed in the dead of winter. The plane, transporting fuel, equipment, and

Hammes, Thomas X. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. Manas Publications: New Delhi, India, 2018, 321 pps. This book describes the transitions in the five generations of modern warfare based on the development of political, economic, social, and military

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Back to Table of Contents networks. It provides a historical perspective of how the small guy nearly always beats the big guy along with the methodology that is currently being used against us in the world today. It points to shortfalls in government organization, leadership thinking, and warfighter and “agency” training. No better book on the subject and a top 10 in all time reading in content, style, and current day perspective. (M. W. Garrambone) Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare (CW): Theory and Practice. Praeger Security International: Westport, CT, 2006, 107 pps. CW is “the book” about insurgency, a protracted struggle methodically conducted to attain objectives leading to the overthrow of existing order. It contains every aspect of conducting an insurgency, offering strategy and methodology with tactics on military operations and political action. Examples cite ideology, causes, party development, propaganda, and target population impacts. Relevant to those who missed counterinsurgency operations training against Malaya, Algeria, China, and Vietnam, this is the book that would have changed things. (M. W. Garrambone) Miller, Donald L. Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke down the Nazi War Machine. Ebury Press: London, UK, 2006, 671 pps. Take a harrowing ride through the skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden with the young men that America sent to Europe to fight the Nazis. Gain a unique air war perspective that addresses why long-range fighters were not deployed initially with the B-17s and B-24s to England and learn how carpet bombing became the technique used to destroy Germany’s synthetic oil factories, impact on weapon production plants, threaten the homeland, and much, much more. This book is a must read for modern war planners, amateur historians, and ORSAs. (D. H. Timian)

MORS Publications Committee MORS Project Leader:. Mr. Michael W. Garrambone, FS MORS Publications Chair: . Dr. Steven Lagan MORS Continuing Education and Publications Manager: . Ms. Tina Yan VP for Professional Development: . Mr. Jed Richards

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DISCOVER Membership Why Join

Join MORS and you’ll be a part of a unique professional organization that has served the OR professional community and the United States National Security community for more than 55 years. When you become part of the MORS community, and contribute to and benefit from important MORS opportunities, you’ll be better positioned to produce optimal results, enhance your career and advance the profession.

Our Membership

Members of the Society include a cross-section of the best defense analysts, operators and managers from government, industry and academia. The involvement of such a wide range of practitioners fosters professional interchange, the sharing of insights and information on challenging national security issues and support decision makers in the many organizations and agencies that address national defense. Being a MORS member gives you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate your technical and leadership abilities. Thousands of operations research professionals make MORS the leader of the national security analytic community through their membership, attendance at meetings, and through the quality and importance of their published reports and presentations.

MORS Programs:

• The annual MORS Symposium with 600+ classified and unclassified sessions • Year-round Professional Development Communities organized around the 35 Symposium Working Groups, specialized Communities of Practice and geographic Chapters • The annual Education and Professional Development Colloquium for students and young analysts For more information, please contact Katherine Miller at [email protected] or 703-933-9078.

Visit www.MORS.org

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MORS Young Analysts The Next Generation of Leaders

The future of operations research and the national security community depends on new analysts taking the helm. MORS’ Young Analyst Initiative facilitates this process by providing paths for emerging analysts to engage with MORS through publishing, meeting participation, volunteering, mentorship, and recognition. To highlight the achievements, interests, and aspirations of young analysts, we turn the spotlight on one deserving individual in every issue of the Phalanx.

MAJ Dusty Turner When did you join MORS? I joined MORS in 2016. As a newcomer to the field, I was seeking opportunities to grow and learn from others. A mentor, COL Joe Lindquist, recommended that I develop some research to present at the annual symposium, and I have enjoyed being a part of the society ever since. What was your childhood ambition? I have always aspired to work in a math-related field. My goal was to use mathematics to teach and make a positive impact on the lives of others. Why did you become an operations analyst? During my mid-career in the Army, I saw an opportunity to become an FA49 (operations research systems analyst). Making this transition would allow me to use my education to hopefully make a difference in the lives of Soldiers and our nation. What is your background in operations research? I have an undergraduate degree in operations research from West Point, a master’s degree in integrated systems engineering from Ohio State, and I am currently pursuing a PhD in statistics from Baylor University. In my career with the Army, I have leveraged my background in data science to model the impact of COVID-19 on the Army, address issues related to vaccine distribution, and analyze policy changes within the JAG Corps. Where do you see yourself in five years? In five years, I hope to be serving in a position in the Army where I’m leading data science teams to help leaders solve tough problems. I hope to be influential in how the Army leverages data science in both innovative and creative solutions and making it more accessible throughout the Army. How has your MORS membership benefited you? MORS has been an excellent way to interact with other analysts across the military. The symposiums and working groups are a great way to learn from others, share your knowledge, and discover new problems to help work towards a solution.

To learn more about the Young Analyst Initiative and connect with other young analysts, please visit . mors.org/Member-Central/Become-a-Member/Junior-Analyst

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CM

MY

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CMY

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Is big data giving you big problems? Relax, we've got you. CANA LLC is a veteran-owned and woman-owned small business headquartered in Northern Virginia. We are a group of consummate professionals with extensive Federal government and commercial experience providing intimate logistics and analytics service offerings to our clients. We... Improve organizational operations management, planning, and use of data to make decisions Establish cost savings and significant investment returns with a focus on improving performance, readiness and capabilities Craft analytics/OR-based decision support planning solutions in logistics, maintenance and supply chain operations Apply statistical, simulation and optimization-based tools and analysis to support improvements to systems operations Provide product placement solutions through strategic partnerships Provide operations research and studies analysis for concept development and employment to support course of action analysis and decision making Enhance organizational data quality, processes and planning through analytics assessments and action plan execution.

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Milestones Mike Kwinn, FS, was recently appointed a Professor of Practice and the Director of the Engineering Management Program in the Systems and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Arizona. Brigitte and Mike received their Master of Systems Engineering degrees from that Department a long time ago and Mike Kwinn has returned to academia at his he feels great to alma mater, the University of Arizona. have returned to a place that has always felt like home. Mike looks forward to returning to more active MORS participation now that he’s back in academia. In December 2022, Tammy McNeley was selected as a winner of the Houston Texans Community Quarterback Award. The Houston Texans, the United Way of Greater Houston, and Community Coffee all partner to recognize

Tammy McNeley is honored for her commitment to STEM education and advancing girls in the technical fields.

the work done by outstanding volunteers who exemplify leadership, dedication, and a commitment to improving

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their communities. Tammy was nominated by Girls Inc. of Greater Houston for her dedication to supporting K–12 STEM development and inspiring all girls to be Strong, Smart, and Bold. As a recent retiree, she has provided weekly presentations at Houston schools discussing the engineering design process and the importance of testing the designs and analyzing the test results. Due to Tammy’s contributions to the community, Girls Inc. of Greater Houston received a $5,000 contribution from the Houston Texans Foundation and Community Coffee. Tammy is a long-time MORS supporter, having served on the MORS Board of Directors from 2018 to 2022 and currently serving as a MORS Advisory Director. Dr. Jackie Henningsen, FS, will be among the distinguished members of the Northwest Missouri State University family to be honored during the annual Northwest Alumni Awards Banquet on April 22. In recognizing Jackie, the university noted that she began her career as a high school mathematics teacher, in addition to directing plays and coaching volleyball. However, her concerns about the impact of math Jackie Henningsen is to be avoidance by young women recognized by Northwest Missouri State University for her led her to advocacy for distinguished service. nontraditional career paths for women and eventually to pursue a doctorate degree in industrial and management systems engineering. In 1985, she joined the Strategic Air Command’s Office of Operations Research, applying analysis to nuclear deterrence and conventional warfighting assessments. In 1992, she was chosen to serve in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Program Analysis and Evaluation, with oversight of strategic and space launch systems, and subsequently the department’s joint campaign model development and country teams in the U.S./NATO Partnership for Peace Program. Capping a stellar career as a civil servant, Jackie served as Air Force Director for Studies and Analyses, Assessments and Lessons Learned,

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MORS Policy where she served as principal analytic advisor to five successive Air Force top military leaders and guided a thousand-plus member career field. Among other awards and accolades, she was recognized in 2012 with the Presidential Distinguished Executive Rank Award, which is the U.S. government’s highest recognition of senior civilian service members for sustained extraordinary accomplishments. She also is a recipient of the Society’s Vance R. Wanner Memorial Award for lifetime professional excellence in military operations research. The Dr. Jacqueline R. Henningsen Air Force Analyst Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded by the Air Force annually in her honor. Jim Bexfield (Bex), FS, hosts a weekly current affairs discussion group at his “over 55” Affinity home in Ft. Collins, CO. Chris Fossett, FS, who visited Colorado in January, was invited as a guest speaker to share perspectives about the Government Accountability Office and MORS. Both her talk and her visit were great successes as she went swimming twice and attended a craft gathering, a wine tasting event, and more. Bex is hoping to get Chris on the pickleball court the next time she visits.

for Publication of Letters to the Phalanx Editor Phalanx serves as an important vehicle for the discussion of topics of interest to the national security operations research and analytic community. Our readers expect the magazine to present thoughtful, stimulating, and professional discussion of technical and professional issues relevant to our community. Accordingly, we encourage dialogue and the exchange of views. Readers can contribute to the conversation via letters to the Editor or through submission of articles introducing or furthering the discussion of a topic. Letters to the Editor are published at the discretion of the Publisher, Editor, and Publications Committee Chair. The following guidelines are provided: f Letters to the Editor are limited to responses to previously published Phalanx articles or MORS current events. f Letters in response to a previously published Phalanx article must focus only on the technical and professional aspects addressed in the original article. The article’s original authors will be offered adequate opportunity to respond prior to publication. f Letters to the Editor should be limited to 300 hundred words.

Is there something in your personal or professional life you want to share with your fellow MORSians? Items for Milestones can be sent to [email protected]. Photos welcome!

For longer discussion of issues, please submit an article for publication through the regular Phalanx publication process. Articles are likewise published at the discretion of the Publisher, Editor, and Publications Committee Chair. Direct open letters to the MORS community to the MORS President and MORS CEO.

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Total Analytic Integration Is Achievable

Mr. Douglas Hoffman, Director, USMC Operations Analysis Directorate; Mr. Andy Farnsler, Senior Campaign Analyst; and Dr. John Young, Technical Director

T

he Marine Corps is building a state-of-the-art analytic capability on the idyllic western shore of the Potomac River at Quantico. There are many who see the Wargaming and Analysis Center as a “one-stop shop” for addressing some of the most important issues facing the service.1 In addition to the many challenges of procuring the new facility, an unparalleled opportunity for the analytic community is taking shape. It is here that analysts will rapidly integrate outcomes of studies, wargaming, and experimentation to shape future force design and other senior leader decisions.

Opportunity Knocks Defining the opportunity was the first step to benefiting from it. Recent experience taught senior leaders that rapid innovation could solve warfighting problems to achieve victories and keep Marines alive. Notably, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle was developed and fielded in under three years and improved continuously.2 Historically, there were large disconnects between operational, acquisition, and analytic communities. Although pockets of excellence existed, many Department of Defense (DoD) institutional processes suffered from a lack of data and, subsequently, focus. The Marine Corps was no different. Disconnects 1.

This article addresses force design capability procurement issues primarily. Other topics are not discussed here. 2. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP.

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have always hampered analytic progress along the force design continuum of (1) existing and proposed systems, (2) science and technology, and (3) futures development. Experience in recent conflicts as well as historical acquisition failures and delays taught the Department to innovate rapidly. This approach is validated by the relentless commercial technology development of the past three decades. Rapid capability development and other transaction authorities exist to get advanced capabilities in the hands of warfighters quickly. Even now for DoD, the operational capabilities of current systems often leave decision makers with a predefined and less than ideal path to future force potential. For example, the Services are largely unable to implement M-code on navigation devices due to legacy technology gaps even though the anti-jam capability has been available for years (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021). A holistic, integrated framework of analytic influence is necessary to adequately inform tradeoffs.

Unstoppable Force Design The Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) established the integration framework when he directed Force Design 2030 (hereafter referred to as “Force Design”), an evolutionary change to the way Marines fight. This Force Design (FD) “sea-change” seeks closure of significant operational warfighting gaps to fulfill the Marine Corps role in the National Defense Strategy. A critical challenge

Back to Table of Contents to the successful analytic integration of FD efforts is the ambiguity of data on future systems, concepts, and capabilities. This obstacle is particularly acute when attempting to address capability requirements beyond the five-year defense plan (FYDP) cycle. Specific integration challenges include data unsurety associated with technological maturity, funding decisions, basic research discoveries, strategy and concept development, threat development changing assumptions due to testing, experimentation, and wargaming results.

Dream Teamwork To address these challenges, the Marine Corps examines specific warfighting functions and key operational problems. Senior leaders form integrated planning teams (IPTs) of Marine operational experts to analyze specific issues including the infantry, logistics, and reconnaissance, to name but a few. IPTs examine roles and missions of specific force elements to determine how they contribute to approved Marine Corps warfighting concepts under future threat scenarios. This work typically addresses not just force structure but also the unit of action’s interoperability, dependencies, operational implementation, survivability, lethality, sustainability, and contributions to warfighting functions. An IPT’s overarching goal is to identify shortfalls that may prevent the force type from enabling future warfighting concepts and offer solutions. The IPTs determine specific actions to not only address each gap but also consider opportunities that new concepts and technologies will enable. IPT leaders brief the results of their sessions to senior leaders, including the CMC. The Commandant approves or denies recommendations and has been known to give “do-overs” when an IPT has missed the mark. An annual synchronization IPT examines the second- and third-order factors of IPT recommendations to ensure the combined arms team will function properly. After results of the “sync IPT” are adjudicated, the Commandant publishes results, other strategic guidance, and specific tasking in the annual Force Design Update. Decisions resulting from IPTs create the FD way forward, but still must be integrated into analysis to assess their pitfalls and contributions to the future force.

Synchronicity To synchronize all FD development efforts, Marine senior leaders instituted a Campaign of Learning (CoL) that

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centralizes FD information development3: “The Campaign of Learning provides the analytic underpinning for Force Design. It is supported by a combination of exercises, experiments, wargames, and analysis” (U.S. Marine Corps, 2021). In this way, results are shared among all stakeholders to increase common understanding. Additionally, relevant analytic insights can be incorporated into exercises, experiments, and wargames as well as other science and technology efforts, including rapid capability development, testing and evaluation, and technology demonstration. It is this research4 that facilitates rapid incorporation of lessons learned into cyclical acquisition decisions with the end goal of more efficiently using resources. In that way, the Marine Corps will quickly provide warfighters with critical capabilities they need to win future wars. Force Design focused on the warfighter supported by the CoL leverages an informal “cycle of research.” This concentration on integrating research effectively gathers lessons learned from analytic efforts into studies and analysis. Key analytic leaders regularly discuss critically important questions to inform future FD efforts. These questions are derived from the CoL, senior leader input, joint analysis and concepts, advanced projects (primarily S&T efforts by sister Services and DoD or other federal agencies), and from the cycle of research itself. Analysts use existing tools or develop new ones to address operational and acquisition problems with available data. The end goal of the cycle of research feeding the CoL is to better inform force structure and resourcing decisions. This has provided a conduit to informed testing and experimentation which, in turn, refines the data available. Hands-on use of novel technology and prototype systems generates valuable feedback and lessons learned for rapid development efforts. Conclusions and recommendations from supervised concept and immature technology use inform the CoL. The result is a refining of the critical details that will give warfighters an edge on tomorrow’s battlefield. This shortening of the typical acquisition cycle also provides resource efficiency. For example, exercises by field Marines, where new technology is used, help inform doctrine, wargames, and tactics, techniques, and procedures. The cycle of research is incomplete without operations research analysts.

3. 4.

See also Force Design 2030: May 2022 Update process map, available at www.Marines.mil/Force-Design-2030. The term “research” is hereafter used to refer to the comprehensive CoL efforts of exercises, experiments, wargames, rapid capability development, testing and evaluation, technology demonstrations, studies, and analysis.

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Modeling Is Believing Trained analysts have the tools and knowledge to examine data and provide insight decision makers need to sustain the CoL. In Quantico, civilian and uniformed Marine Corps operations research professionals are closely involved with capability developers, wargamers, and experimenters under the Deputy Commandant (DC) for Combat Development and Integration (CD&I). This enables the cycle of research by synchronizing efforts focused on FD priorities established by the Commandant. The Operations Analysis Directorate (OAD) is closely aligned at worker and supervisor levels with their force development counterparts in the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Capabilities Development Directorate under the DC, CD&I. This partnership extends to modeling, simulation, and analysis of key problems and questions at the system, mission, and campaign levels. It is also tied to the joint analytic community through formal efforts including the Analysis Working Group (AWG) and Joint Force Operating Scenarios (JFOS). Joint analytic community involvement ensures that Marine Corps equities and capabilities are represented in analysis. Marine Corps analysts are also kept apprised of the latest techniques, data, systems, and capabilities for accurate modeling. Data integration is also improved by working with joint counterparts on studies and scenario building, particularly for campaign modeling in JFOS. The AWG provides guidance and resources for the joint analytic community, advancing the “common good” for all in terms of studies, workspaces, and knowledge including analytic kits and lunchtime professional education. Marine Corps analysts working with the AWG last year secured $1 million in funding for a study with the goal of modeling offensive cyber operations for use by the entire AWG community of interest. This is another step on the path to improving analytic capabilities in all warfighting domains.

Integration Station OAD is working to conduct all-domain analysis and the Wargaming and Analysis Center will facilitate that goal. Cyber and space capabilities are increasingly critical to joint warfighting and our analytic capabilities must improve. Additionally, to perform meaningful analysis impacting critical decisions, OAD is also building tools and data at the highest classification levels. More and more future capability information involves highly classified data. To address these requirements, the facility’s capabilities will include networked wargaming and the largest special

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access program secure facility on the east coast. Even with these advancements, information compartmentalization is expected to remain an impediment to full integration. For that reason, OAD developed a prototype model and process to enable analysis at all classification levels. Building the tools and integration framework now will allow OAD to integrate analysis when the Wargaming and Analysis Center is finished and functional. The Center will open in 2024, with full operational capability expected in 2025. Senior Marine leaders have an ambitious goal for the new facility: total analytic integration. This means synchronizing all available data and assumptions across the force design continuum with joint programs, in all domains, at all classification levels. With FD as the engine driving change, analysts believe they are on course to facilitate this lofty objective. Indeed, Marine Corps OR professionals are working to build the capability to rapidly integrate research to shape future force design. This opportunity is too good to pass up.

References U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2021. GPS Modernization: DOD Continuing to Develop New JamResistant Capability, but Widespread Use Remains Years Away. GAO Report 21-145. https://www.gao.gov/ products/gao-21-145. U.S. Marine Corps. 2021. Force Design 2030: Annual Update. https://www.Marines.mil/Portals/1/Docs/2021 Force Design Annual Update.pdf.

About the Authors Mr. Douglas Hoffman is the Director of the Operations Analysis Directorate (OAD), Headquarters Marine Corps, Combat Development and Integration (CD&I), Quantico, Virginia. He leads the largest group of operations research analysts, both military and civilian, in the Marine Corps and is a member of the Senior Advisory Group of the Analytic Federation. Mr. Hoffman oversees the operations research analysis portfolio of OAD that includes the formal Marine Corps Studies System, many command-driven, shorter

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term requests for support, oversight of the 8850 and 8825 occupational fields, the 1515 community of interest, and support for forward deployed analysts. Mr. Hoffman has a master’s degree in national resource strategy from the Eisenhower School, formerly the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and a master’s degree in operations research from the Florida Institute of Technology. Mr. Andrew Farnsler served 34 years in the Department of Defense and amassed a wealth of experience in leadership, analysis, policy, plans, and program evaluation methods while directly supporting U.S. Army missions. He is a proven innovator dedicated to achieving organizational goals while ensuring leaders and warfighters benefit from analytical tools and products. Mr. Farnsler has Master of Science degrees in operations research and interactive simulation and training systems design from the University of Central Florida.

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Dr. John Young is the Technical Director of the Operations Analysis Directorate (OAD), Headquarters Marine Corps, Combat Development and Integration (CD&I), Quantico, Virginia. He is responsible for ensuring Marine Corps studies and analysis are high quality and aligned to issues relevant to the Marine Corps senior leaders. He coordinates the efforts of the Analytic Community of Interest across the Marine Corps and serves as the sponsor’s representative to the board of directors of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS). Dr. Young has been an active member of MORS, first serving as a working group chair for Modeling and Simulation in 2014. He spent five years on the MORS board of directors, culminating in serving as the society’s annual symposium chair in 2020. Dr. Young has PhD and Master of Engineering degrees in modeling and simulation from Old Dominion University. He lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with his wife Mary and sons Matt (14) and Teddy (7).

Ms. Robbin Beall Retires Mr. Trip Barber, FS

Non sibi sed patriae

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f you ever wondered whether a career government civilian operations research analyst can truly make a difference at the Department of Defense (DoD)-wide level, the career that Virginia “Robbin” Beall closed out with her retirement from the Navy Assessment Division (N81) in December 2022 proves that the answer is, “yes.” Her skill as a leader of analysis projects and organizations, her relentless pursuit of getting the right analytic work done the right way, and her remarkable communications and relationship-building skills allowed her to shape the entire Department’s approach to warfare analysis.

Robbin began her analytic career in the private sector, doing antisubmarine warfare analysis. With this experience as background, she moved into Navy government service in 1988, leading systems engineering work for command and control systems. That led to a detailing to the Navy’s operations analysis organization, the OPNAV Assessment Division (N81) in 1995, and she remained there as a member of the Chief of Naval Operations staff in the Pentagon until her retirement 27 years later. She could do anything and do it well, so she moved steadily up through diverse project and portfolio analytic leadership

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assignments until she was appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 2004 as the Associate Director for Campaign Analysis and Modeling.

scenarios for making their decisions, Robbin built and led a coalition of the services to develop and employ such scenarios anyway in order to continue doing the campaign analysis that the services still needed for their own decisions. The power and utility of this form of analysis eventually brought the whole of DoD back to a place where Robbin had never left. Robbin’s personal leadership, persistence, and analytic excellence literally changed the course of decision making through the U.S. defense establishment and established the framework used for major defense warfighting decisions at both the headquarters and COCOM levels. This kind of broad joint impact does not normally come from a career civilian within a single service, but Robbin is an exceptional talent and an irresistible force! Robbin did far more than campaign analysis in her career as an analytic leader. She led development of an extensive array of new modeling technologies, led Navy coordination of analysis with our closest Five Eyes allies, and led the revival and focusing of Navy wargaming. Most importantly, she “paid forward” to build future generations of analytic leadership by mentoring and training the generations of young analysts who came through N81 in her time there and led the Navy program to recruit Presidential Management Fellows.

Robbin invented Navy campaign analysis and made it the foundational analytic framework within which the Navy has evaluated program and budget alternatives, force structure requirements, and capability sufficiency for the past 20 years. Finding the Navy’s available analytic tools to be inadequate to address the full scope of multidimensional joint warfare, she led the complex multiyear development of maritime warfare functionality for the U.S. Air Forcedeveloped STORM campaign model, thereby making it today’s de facto DoD standard model for joint campaign analysis. Her personal skills in building this technical partnership with a sister service then led to the first-ever full partnership with the Air Force in conducting campaign analysis with a common multiservice baseline for the leadership of both services. When DoD leadership went through a phase of devaluing campaign analysis and the use of detailed warfare

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Robbin’s achievements garnered an impressive array of well-deserved recognition. She received the MORS Vance R. Wanner Award for career analytic leadership in 2018. The Deputy Secretary of Defense recognized her for joint analytic leadership with the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Department’s highest civilian award, in 2015. The Navy recognized her twice with Department of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Awards. And she received awards for outstanding achievement in modeling and simulation from both the Navy and the Defense Department. Robbin Beall’s distinguished professional career set the example for government civilian operations research analysts. You really can make a difference if you hold yourself to high standards in both technical and leadership skills, always do the right thing the right way, and step forward to lead as a team builder when leadership is needed. That’s what Robbin did, and she made a difference at a national scale.

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A N A LY T I C S Make Analytics Easy Cover Everything Be Everywhere Enable Everyone Solving with Alteryx Since 2019

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Re-Introducing MORS Government Sponsor:

Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate’s Operations and Requirements Analysis Division Mr. Jonathan McEntee, Operations and Requirements Analysis Director, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Office of Science and Engineering

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he Department of Homeland Security (DHS) joined the ranks of MORS Government Sponsors in 2016 though DHS analysts have actively engaged the Society since the Department’s creation in 2002. Today, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Operations and Requirements Analysis Division (ORA) serves as the Department’s sponsoring organization. Over the past seven years, S&T ORA and an increasing number of analysts from across the DHS have participated in MORS symposia and a wide range of special events. Notably, in the past two years, S&T ORA has sponsored a pair of well-received special meetings on analytic topics of interagency interest, the March 2021 “Acquisition Analytics for Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems” workshop and the more recent December 2022 “Scoping the Analytical Implications of Climate Change and Extreme Events for National Security” special meeting. Looking forward, S&T ORA will continue to collaborate

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with MORS and fellow Government Sponsors to identify emerging issues and help plan and participate in activities that enhance the quality of analyses that inform national and homeland security decisions. For the Phalanx readership not familiar with DHS S&T, the Directorate is the science advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security and serves as the Department’s research and development (R&D) arm. S&T conducts basic and applied research, development, testing, and evaluation activities. Within S&T, ORA leads and facilitates the Directorate’s engagement with DHS components, providing operations and requirements analysis tools and services, component relationship management, and innovative DHS R&D strategies. Through routine involvement with DHS components, ORA understands and advocates for the highest priority DHS mission needs with an R&D nexus, then helps oversee

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development, implementation, and solution delivery. Four branches make up ORA’s division structure: Portfolio Management; Requirements Analysis; Innovation, Research and Development Coordination; and Operations Analysis. This structure connects S&T across the Department and externally on cross-cutting R&D topics of interest to intergovernmental, interagency, and international partners.

requests for assistance with capability gaps. The ORA Innovation, Research, and Development Coordination Branch then leads the information sharing efforts across the Department’s R&D, requirements, and acquisition communities to coordinate innovation and R&D activities to ensure that investments best meet DHS-wide strategic priorities.

Each ORA branch plays a part to help S&T align resources to DHS component R&D needs. ORA portfolio managers lead component engagement and coordinate integrated product teams (IPTs) in order to understand component mission needs and advocate for specific R&D needs throughout S&T. IPTs play a critical role in outreach, supporting each component by identifying and introducing capability gaps to knowledgeable S&T partners, then helping to oversee solution development, delivery, and transition. Part of this process involves careful consideration of high-priority technological capability gaps, which designated teams break into elements for S&T partners to understand and develop new capabilities. ORA employs rigorous processes to ensure the Directorate collects and prioritizes DHS component R&D needs to help determine future S&T investments.

ORA has led the effort to establish a DHS-wide Innovation, Research, and Development Coordination Council, develop a framework for the Department’s first Innovation, Research, and Development Strategic Plan, and baseline current DHS R&D and innovation efforts. Additionally, ORA established four working groups to focus on future priorities, creating forums for strategic, cross-component innovation and R&D planning.

Component Engagement and Mission Needs Prioritization ORA portfolio managers use IPTs to facilitate dialogue between S&T and components, communicating priorities, capability gaps, and processes between component stakeholders and the Directorate. They play a critical role in identifying the highest priority component needs and capability gaps, ensuring transparency in execution and effectiveness in S&T activities. In 2022, ORA leveraged 11 IPTs to inform S&T investment decisions, identifying, collecting, and prioritizing 71 distinct R&D needs. The ORA Requirements Analysis Branch receives these component inputs and begins detailed analyses of the identified capability gaps and maintains a centralized database to track R&D needs to ensure traceability and transparency across S&T. This team helps to standardize the process by which S&T considers component capability gaps and mission needs, and the branch’s subsequent gap analysis ensures S&T accurately understands and defines the component’s R&D needs. In 2022, the Requirements Analysis Branch completed 32 gap analyses, or gap decompositions, in response to component

Enhanced and Collaborative Analytics ORA’s Operations Analysis Branch provides operations analyses, business case analyses, and operational decision support services to both S&T and the wider DHS community. ORA’s team provides analytic resources that reduce the time devoted to routine analysis, reporting, and decision making. They deliver knowledge products that respond to DHS Headquarters and component mission priorities. S&T launched System of Systems Operational Analytics (SoSOA) in 2017 as a collaborative environment for operations analysis to enable complex, timely decision making. These tools and knowledge products improve decision making to support components, and the greater DHS mission. In 2020, the SoSOA team began supporting DHS Headquarters offices to better communicate financial and staffing information to senior departmental leadership as well as office-level business/program/portfolio managers. Offices were previously limited by basic analysis, reporting, and visualization capabilities that resulted in inefficiencies and used up time poring over spreadsheets and updating routine reports. The SoSOA team developed dynamic visual analytics using workflows and dashboards to introduce repeatable processes to quickly update, analyze, and visualize data. Through this effort, the new data preparation workflows and analytic dashboards reduced time spent by analysts manually updating spreadsheets and reports, and increased transparency, accountability, and visibility into data. Insights gained from improved data visualizations

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informed analyses into historical and current trends and data anomalies, informing decisions and helping forecast demand in a resource-constrained environment. SoSOA also helped DHS law enforcement and other federal agencies improve their processes for managing resources and anticipating how changes in policy would impact them. Using open source and component-level data, the SoSOA team developed analytic tools and visualizations to model complex immigration processes for managing asylum seekers. The R-based model ran hundreds of iterations in minutes, with built-in flexibility for changing variables where policies change. These models helped operational components refine analyses into their processes, explore the implications of policy options, and inform resource allocation decisions. Decision makers were given the

ability to visualize how performance, resource, or system modifications impact processes and identify changes that could result in more efficient operations. Analysts were given tools to perform transparent and traceable analyses to support data-driven decisions, in less time than they would have dedicated using traditional decision support tools. ORA’s value lies in its support to S&T and DHS component goals, through building advocacy, informing investments, and supporting transition of priority investments. Through careful coordination with DHS Headquarters and components, developing tailored decision support analytics, improving component operations and cost/ benefit assessment, ORA ensures S&T responds to the highest priority DHS mission needs.

About the Author Mr. Jonathan McEntee is currently the Operations and Requirements Analysis Director within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Office of Science and Engineering. He leads S&T’s integrated product teams (IPTs) to identify, collect, and prioritize R&D needs from DHS operational components to inform S&T investments, and manages the collaboration and coordination of R&D investments across DHS. Mr. McEntee also manages S&T’s analytical tool capabilities that provide operations, requirements, and business case decision support services to DHS. Prior to his current position, Mr. McEntee was detailed to the S&T front office as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Chief of Staff. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. McEntee was the Acting Borders, Immigration, and Maritime Director for S&T where he worked closely with Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to research, develop, test, and evaluate technical alternatives to meet overall Homeland Security Enterprise capability gap needs. Mr. McEntee was the Deputy Director for S&T’s Borders and Maritime Security Division (BMD) from 2013 to 2016 and held

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several program management roles since 2011, which included managing maritime security systems, border information exchange architectures, and cargo security initiatives. Prior to that, he served one year as a DHS Legislative Fellow on Capitol Hill working as an advisor to a U.S. Senator on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. From 2007 to 2010, Mr. McEntee worked as the Chief of Business Operations for BMD. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. McEntee provided systems engineering and technical assistance to BMD as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee. Mr. McEntee also has a background in the Department of Defense working for BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman Information Technology, and AMCORP from 1999 to 2005. Specifically, Mr. McEntee was the Undersea Warfare Command and Control (USWC2) lead for the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Requirements Office. He also acted as a liaison for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), Program Executive Office of Integrated Warfare Systems (PEOIWS), in which he provided programmatic, systematic, and financial support for various USW programs. Mr. McEntee holds a Master of Business Administration from Salisbury University and a Bachelor of Science in finance from Frostburg State University.

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Coming Soon to Military Operations Research Risk Reduction in Target Motion Analysis Using Approximate Dynamic Programming By Joseph Goldfrank, M. E. Paté-Cornell, Gregory Forbes, and David Liedtka The authors investigate the use of approximate dynamic programming methods in target tracking problems using linear array sensors commonly used in undersea and surface maritime domains. These methods can be broadly applied to arbitrary sensor geometries and can be used to reduce various operational risks that a decision maker wishes to quantify.

The Robust Weapon Target Assignment Problem By Jungho Park and Hadi El-Amine The weapon-target assignment problem (WTAP) is the problem of optimal assignment of weapons and munitions to targets. The authors develop and study robust/stochastic versions of the WTAP to handle information uncertainties and propose several computational methods to solve different problem instances. To assess the performance of all numerical schemes, the article includes an extensive numerical study that demonstrates that the proposed algorithms perform well and solve most problem instances in reasonable time.

Readiness-Based Sparing Models: What You See May Not Be What You Get By Tovey Bachman, Jeffery Goldsmith, and Jonathan Nix Readiness-based sparing (RBS) models link spare parts investment to weapon system availability. Using a simulation, the authors assessed the results of periodically updating RBS levels on performance and spares inventory. They show that forecast instability and demand patterns that do not fit the theoretical assumptions can cause performance to differ significantly from the projections made by an RBS model, with profound implications for the expectation of how RBS models will perform in the real world.

Solving the Defender-Attacker-Defender Constrained Shortest Path Problem with Lagrangian Relaxation By Gary Lazzaro and W. Matthew Carlyle The authors present a defender-attacker-defender formulation of the constrained shortest path (CSP) problem. Vehicles find the shortest path to a destination, and observe a secondary constraint, travel time. Attackers attempt to increase some path segment costs, and defenders protect portions of the path from attack. The authors show how to decompose the problem, and then combine the subproblem with Lagrangian relaxation of the CSP problem into a simpler linear programming formulation.

MilGLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark Platform for Natural Language Understanding in the Military Domain By Jenna Hallapy, Thom Hawkins, Troy Kelley, Cuyler O’Brien, and Joseph R. Zipkin Natural language models are achieving super-human performance across a range of tasks, such as classification or topic modeling, but they perform best in the domain of data in which they are trained. For more esoteric language usage with specialized jargon such as legal, academia, and the military, the models need to be adapted to reach the same level of performance. This article discusses MilGLUE, a benchmark dataset for evaluating performance of natural language models in the military domain.

Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Oral History Project Interview of Dr. Harry J. Thie, FS Interview by Bill Dunn, FS, and Bob Sheldon, FS Dr. Harry J. Thie served as MORS Secretary-Treasurer from 1987 to 1988 and MORS Vice President for Administration from 1988 to 1989. In 1999, he was elected a Fellow of the Society (FS). In 2015, he received the Clayton J. Thomas award. His oral history appears in the online version of this issue, available at https://www.mors.org/Publications/ MOR-Journal.

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