Mystics & Statistics

Some Useful Resources for Post-World War II U.S. Army Doctrine Development

This list originated in response to a Twitter query discussing the history of post-World War II U.S. Army doctrine development. It is hardly exhaustive but it does include titles and resources that may not be widely known.

The first two are books:

Benjamin Jensen, Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army (Stanford University Press, 2016)

Jensen focused on the institutional processes shaping the Army’s continual post-war World War II efforts to reform its doctrine in response to changes in the character of modern warfare.

Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Routledge, 1997)

In an excellent overview of the evolution of operational thought through the 20th century, Naveh devoted two chapters to the Army’s transition to Active Defense in the 70s and then to AirLand Battle in the 80s.

There are several interesting monographs that are available online:

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam (NDU Press, 1986)

Paul Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations (Combat Studies Institute, 1988)

John Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: the Development of Army Doctrine 1973-1982 (TRADOC, 1984)

John Romjue, The Army of Excellence: The Development of the 1980s Army (TRADOC, 1997)

John Romjue, American Army Doctrine for the Post-Cold War (TRADOC, 1997)

A really useful place to browse is the Army Command and General Staff College’s online Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). It is loaded with old manuals and student papers and theses addressing a wide variety of topics related to the nuts and bolts of doctrine.

Another good place to browse is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), which is a huge digital library of government sponsored research. I recommend searches on publications by the Army’s defunct operations research organizations: Operations Research Office (ORO), Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), and the Special Operations Research Office (SORO). The Combat Operations Research Group (CORG), particularly a series of studies of Army force structure from squads to theater HQ’s by Virgil Ney. There is much more to find in DTIC.

Two other excellent places to browse for material on doctrine are the Combat Studies Institute Press publications on CARL and the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s publications.

Some journals with useful research include the Journal of Cold War Studies and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

If anyone else has suggestions, let me know.

Diddlysquat

This blog post is generated as a response to one of Richard Anderson’s comments to this blog post:

Validating Attrition

Richard Anderson used to work with me at Trevor Dupuy’s company DMSI and later at The Dupuy Institute. He has been involved in this business since 1987, although he has been away from it for over a decade.

His comment was: “Keep fighting the good fight Chris, but it remains an uphill battle.”

It is an uphill battle. For a brief moment, from 1986-1989 it appeared that the community was actually trying to move forward on the model validation and “base of sand” type issues. This is discussed to some extent in Chapter 18 of War by Numbers (pages 295-298).

In 1986 the office of the DUSA (OR) * reviewed the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency’s (CAA) casualty estimation process in their models. This generated considerable comments and criticism of how it was being done. In 1987 CAA, with I gather funding from DUSA (OR), issued out the contract to develop the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB). I was the program manager for that effort. That same year they issued out the contract to study Breakpoints (forced changes in posture) which I was also involved in.

So we had the army conducting an internal review of their models and finding them wanting. They then issued out a contract to validate them and they issued out a contract to examine the issue of breakpoints, which had not been seriously studied since the 1950s. This was at the initiative of Vandiver and Walt Hollis.

After that, everything kind of fell apart. The U.S. defense budget peaked in 1989 and the budget cuts started. So, even though the breakpoints study got a good start, there was no follow-on contract. The ACSDB ended up being used for a casual top-level validation effort that did not get into the nuts and bolts of the models. All the dozens of problems identified in the internal DUSA(OR) report resulted in no corrective action taken (as far as I know). Basically, budget was declining and maintaining hardware was more important that studies and analysis.

There was a resurgence of activity in the early 1990s, which is when the Kursk Data Base (KDB) was funded. But that was never even used for a validation effort (although it was used to test Lanchester). But funding was marginal during most of the 1990s, and the modeling community did little to improve their understanding and analysis of combat.

The nature of the missions changed after 9/11/2001 and The Dupuy Institute ended up focused on insurgencies (see America’s Modern Wars). Budget again started declining in 2009 and then sequestration arrived, killing everything.

The end result was that there was a period from 1986-1989 when the U.S. modeling community appeared to have identified their problems and were taking corrective action. Since 1989, for all practical purposes, diddlysquat.

So…..30 years later…..I am still fighting the “good fight.” But I am not optimistic. Nothing is going to happen unless people at senior levels fund something to happen. For the price of a Stryker or two, a huge amount of productive and useful work could be done. But to date, having an extra Stryker or two has been more important to the army.

For this year and next year the U.S. Army has increasing budgets. If they wanted to take corrective action….now would be the time. I suspect that bureaucratic inertia will have more weight than any intellectual arguments that I can make. Still, I have to give it one last try.

 

* DUSA (OR) = The Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). It was headed by Walt Hollis forever, but was completely shut down in recent times.

Paul Davis (RAND) on Bugaboos

Just scanning the MORS Wargaming Special Meeting, October 2016, Final Report, January 31, 2017. The link to the 95-page report is here:

http://www.mors.org/Portals/23/Docs/Events/2016/Wargaming/MORS%20Wargaming%20Workshop%20Report.pdf?ver=2017-03-01-151418-980

There are a few comments from Dr. Paul Davis (RAND) starting on page 13 that are worth quoting:

I was struck through the workshop by a schism among attendees. One group believes, intuitively and viscerally, that human gaming–although quite powerful–is just a subset of modeling general. The other group believes, just as intuitively and viscerally, that human gaming is very different….

The impression had deep roots. Writings in the 1950s about defense modeling and systems analysis emphasized being scientific, rigorous, quantitative, and tied to mathematics. This was to be an antidote for hand-waving subjective assertions. That desire translated into an emphasis on “closed” models with no human interactions, which allowed reproducibility. Most DoD-level models have often been at theater or campaign level (e.g., IDAGAM, TACWAR, JICM, Thunder, and Storm). Many represent combat as akin to huge armies grinding each other down, as in the European theaters of World Wars I and II. such models are quite large, requiring considerable expertise and experience to understand.

Another development was standardized scenarios and date set with the term “data” referring to everything from facts to highly uncertain assumptions about scenario, commander decisions, and battle outcomes. Standardization allowed common baselines, which assured that policymakers would receive reports with common assumptions rather than diverse hidden assumptions chosen to favor advocates’ programs. The baselines also promoted joint thinking and assured a level playing field for joint analysis. Such reasons were prominent in DoD’s Analytic Agenda (later called Support for Strategic Analysis). Not surprisingly, however, the tendency was often to be disdainful of such other forms of modeling as the history-base formula models of Trevor Dupuy and the commercial board games of Jim Dunnigan and Mark Herman. These alternative approaches seen as somehow “lesser,” because they were allegedly less rigorous and scientific. Uncertainty analysis has been seriously inadequate. I have demurred on these matters for many years, as in the “Base of Sand” paper in 1993 and more recent monographs available on the RAND website….

The quantitative/qualitative split is a bugaboo. Many “soft” phenomena can be characterized with meaningful, albeit imprecise, numbers.

The Paul Davis “Base of Sand” paper from 1991 is here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N3148.html

 

Engaging the Phalanx (part 7 of 7)

Hopefully this is my last post on the subject (but I suspect not, as I expect a public response from the three TRADOC authors). This is in response to the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6). The issue here is the “Base of Sand” problem, which is what the original blog post that “inspired” their article was about:

Wargaming Multi-Domain Battle: The Base Of Sand Problem

While the first paragraph of their article addressed this blog post and they reference Paul Davis’ 1992 Base of Sand paper in their footnotes (but not John Stockfish’s paper, which is an equally valid criticism), they then do not discuss the “Base of Sand” problem further. They do not actually state whether this is a problem or not a problem. I gather by this notable omission that in fact they do understand that it is a problem, but being employees of TRADOC they are limited as to what they can publicly say. I am not.

I do address the “Base of Sand” problem in my book War by Numbers, Chapter 18. It has also been addressed in a few other posts on this blog. We are critics because we do not see significant improvement in the industry. In some cases, we are seeing regression.

In the end, I think the best solution for the DOD modeling and simulation community is not to “circle the wagons” and defend what they are currently doing, but instead acknowledge the limitations and problems they have and undertake a corrective action program. This corrective action program would involve: 1) Properly addressing how to measure and quantify certain aspects of combat (for example: Breakpoints) and 2) Validating these aspects and the combat models these aspects are part of by using real-world combat data. This would be an iterative process, as you develop and then test the model, then further develop it, and then test it again. This moves us forward. It is a more valued approach than just “circling the wagons.” As these models and simulations are being used to analyze processes that may or may not make us fight better, and may or may not save American service members lives, then I think it is important enough to do right. That is what we need to be focused on, not squabbling over a blog post (or seven).

Has The Army Given Up On Counterinsurgency Research, Again?

Mind-the-Gap

[In light of the U.S. Army’s recent publication of a history of it’s involvement in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, it may be relevant to re-post this piece from from 29 June 2016.]

As Chris Lawrence mentioned yesterday, retired Brigadier General John Hanley’s review of America’s Modern Wars in the current edition of Military Review concluded by pointing out the importance of a solid empirical basis for staff planning support for reliable military decision-making. This notion seems so obvious as to be a truism, but in reality, the U.S. Army has demonstrated no serious interest in remedying the weaknesses or gaps in the base of knowledge underpinning its basic concepts and doctrine.

In 2012, Major James A. Zanella published a monograph for the School of Advanced Military Studies of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (graduates of which are known informally as “Jedi Knights”), which examined problems the Army has had with estimating force requirements, particularly in recent stability and counterinsurgency efforts.

Historically, the United States military has had difficulty articulating and justifying force requirements to civilian decision makers. Since at least 1975, governmental officials and civilian analysts have consistently criticized the military for inadequate planning and execution. Most recently, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reinvigorated the debate over the proper identification of force requirements…Because Army planners have failed numerous times to provide force estimates acceptable to the President, the question arises, why are the planning methods inadequate and why have they not been improved?[1]

Zanella surveyed the various available Army planning tools and methodologies for determining force requirements, but found them all either inappropriate or only marginally applicable, or unsupported by any real-world data. He concluded

Considering the limitations of Army force planning methods, it is fair to conclude that Army force estimates have failed to persuade civilian decision-makers because the advice is not supported by a consistent valid method for estimating the force requirements… What is clear is that the current methods have utility when dealing with military situations that mirror the conditions represented by each model. In the contemporary military operating environment, the doctrinal models no longer fit.[2]

Zanella did identify the existence of recent, relevant empirical studies on manpower and counterinsurgency. He noted that “the existing doctrine on force requirements does not benefit from recent research” but suggested optimistically that it could provide “the Army with new tools to reinvigorate the discussion of troops-to-task calculations.”[3] Even before Zanella published his monograph, however, the Defense Department began removing any detailed reference or discussion about force requirements in counterinsurgency from Army and Joint doctrinal publications.

As Zanella discussed, there is a body of recent empirical research on manpower and counterinsurgency that contains a variety of valid and useful insights, but as I recently discussed, it does not yet offer definitive conclusions. Much more research and analysis is needed before the conclusions can be counted on as a valid and justifiably reliable basis for life and death decision-making. Yet, the last of these government sponsored studies was completed in 2010. Neither the Army nor any other organization in the U.S. government has funded any follow-on work on this subject and none appears forthcoming. This boom-or-bust pattern is nothing new, but the failure to do anything about it is becoming less and less understandable.

NOTES

[1] Major James A. Zanella, “Combat Power Analysis is Combat Power Density” (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2012), pp. 1-2.

[2] Ibid, 50.

[3] Ibid, 47.

Historians and the Early Era of U.S. Army Operations Research

While perusing Charles Shrader’s fascinating history of the U.S. Army’s experience with operations research (OR), I came across several references to the part played by historians and historical analysis in early era of that effort.

The ground forces were the last branch of the Army to incorporate OR into their efforts during World War II, lagging behind the Army Air Forces, the technical services, and the Navy. Where the Army was a step ahead, however, was in creating a robust wartime historical field history documentation program. (After the war, this enabled the publication of the U.S. Army in World War II series, known as the “Green Books,” which set a new standard for government sponsored military histories.)

As Shrader related, the first OR personnel the Army deployed forward in 1944-45 often crossed paths with War Department General Staff Historical Branch field historian detachments. They both engaged in similar activities: collecting data on real-world combat operations, which was then analyzed and used for studies and reports written for the use of the commands to which they were assigned. The only significant difference was in their respective methodologies, with the historians using historical methods and the OR analysts using mathematical and scientific tools.

History and OR after World War II

The usefulness of historical approaches to collecting operational data did not go unnoticed by the OR practitioners, according to Shrader. When the Army established the Operations Research Office (ORO) in 1948, it hired a contingent of historians specifically for the purpose of facilitating research and analysis using WWII Army records, “the most likely source for data on operational matters.”

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, ORO sent eight multi-disciplinary teams, including the historians, to collect operational data and provide analytical support for U.S. By 1953, half of ORO’s personnel had spent time in combat zones. Throughout the 1950s, about 40-43% of ORO’s staff was comprised of specialists in the social sciences, history, business, literature, and law. Shrader quoted one leading ORO analyst as noting that, “there is reason to believe that the lawyer, social scientist or historian is better equipped professionally to evaluate evidence which is derived from the mind and experience of the human species.”

Among the notable historians who worked at or with ORO was Dr. Hugh M. Cole, an Army officer who had served as a staff historian for General George Patton during World War II. Cole rose to become a senior manager at ORO and later served as vice-president and president of ORO’s successor, the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC). Cole brought in WWII colleague Forrest C. Pogue (best known as the biographer of General George C. Marshall) and Charles B. MacDonald. ORO also employed another WWII field historian, the controversial S. L. A. Marshall, as a consultant during the Korean War. Dorothy Kneeland Clark did pioneering historical analysis on combat phenomena while at ORO.

The Demise of ORO…and Historical Combat Analysis?

By the late 1950s, considerable institutional friction had developed between ORO, the Johns Hopkins University (JHU)—ORO’s institutional owner—and the Army. According to Shrader,

Continued distrust of operations analysts by Army personnel, questions about the timeliness and focus of ORO studies, the ever-expanding scope of ORO interests, and, above all, [ORO director] Ellis Johnson’s irascible personality caused tensions that led in August 1961 to the cancellation of the Army’s contract with JHU and the replacement of ORO with a new, independent research organization, the Research Analysis Corporation [RAC].

RAC inherited ORO’s research agenda and most of its personnel, but changing events and circumstances led Army OR to shift its priorities away from field collection and empirical research on operational combat data in favor of the use of modeling and wargaming in its analyses. As Chris Lawrence described in his history of federally-funded Defense Department “think tanks,” the rise and fall of scientific management in DOD, the Vietnam War, social and congressional criticism, and an unhappiness by the military services with the analysis led to retrenchment in military OR by the end of the 60s. The Army sold RAC and created its own in-house Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA; now known as the Center for Army Analysis).

By the early 1970s, analysts, such as RAND’s Martin Shubik and Gary Brewer, and John Stockfisch, began to note that the relationships and processes being modeled in the Army’s combat simulations were not based on real-world data and that empirical research on combat phenomena by the Army OR community had languished. In 1991, Paul Davis and Donald Blumenthal gave this problem a name: the “Base of Sand.”

SMEs

Continuing my comments on the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (this is part 6 of 7; see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5).

SMEs….is a truly odd sounding acronym that means Subject Matter Experts. They talk about it extensively in their article, and this I have no problem with. I do want to make three points related to that:

  1. A SME is not a substitution for validation.
  2. In some respects, the QJM (Quantified Judgment Model) is a quantified and validated SME.
  3. How do you know that the SME is right?

If you can substitute a SME for a proper validation effort, then perhaps you could just substitute the SME for the model. This would save time and money. If your SME is knowledgable enough to sprinkle holy water on the model and bless its results, why not just skip the model and ask the SME. We could certainly simplify and speed up analysis by removing the models and just asking our favorite SME. The weaknesses of this approach are obvious.

Then there is Trevor N. Dupuy’s Quantified Judgment Model (QJM) and Quantified Judgment Method of Analysis (QJMA). This is, in some respects, a SME quantified. Actually it was a board of SMEs, who working with a series of historical studies (the list of studies starts here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipubs.htm ). These SMEs developed a set of values for different situations, and then insert them into a model. They then validated the model to historical data (also known as real-world combat data). While the QJM has come under considerable criticism from elements of the Operations Research community…..if you are using SMEs, then in fact, you are using something akin, but less rigorous, than Trevor Dupuy’s Quantified Judgment Method of Analysis.

This last point, how do we know that the SME is right, is significant. How do you test your SMEs to ensure that what they are saying is correct? Another SME, a board of SMEs? Maybe a BOGSAT? Can you validate SMEs? There are limits to SME’s. In the end, you need a validated model.

 

Historical Demonstrations?

Photo from the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers

Continuing my comments on the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (this is part 5 of 7; see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

The authors of the Phalanx article then make the snarky statement that:

Combat simulations have been successfully used to replicate historical battles as a demonstration, but this is not a requirement or their primary intended use.

So, they say in three sentences that combat models using human factors are difficult to validate, they then say that physics-based models are validated, and then they say that running a battle through a model is a demonstration. Really?

Does such a demonstration show that the model works or does not work? Does such a demonstration show that they can get a reasonable outcome when using real-world data? The definition of validation that they gave on the first page of their article is:

The process of determining the degree to which a model or simulation with its associated data is an accurate representation of the real world from the perspective of its intended use is referred to as validation.

This is a perfectly good definition of validation. So where does one get that real-world data? If you are using the model to measure combat effects (as opposed to physical affects) then you probably need to validate it to real-world combat data. This means historical combat data, whether it is from 3,400 years ago or 1 second ago. You need to assemble the data from a (preferably recent) combat situation and run it through the model.

This has been done. The Dupuy Institute does not exist in a vacuum. We have assembled four sets of combat data bases for use in validation. They are:

  1. The Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base
  2.  The Kursk Data Base
  3. The Battle of Britain Data Base
  4. Our various division-level, battalion-level and company-level engagement database bases.

Now, the reason we have mostly used World War II data is that you can get detailed data from the unit records of both sides. To date….this is not possible for almost any war since 1945. But, if your high-tech model cannot predict lower-tech combat….then you probably also have a problem modeling high-tech combat. So, it is certainly a good starting point.

More to the point, this was work that was funded in part by the Center for Army Analysis, the Deputy Secretary of the Army (Operations Research) and Office of Secretary of Defense, Planning, Analysis and Evaluation. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent developing some of these databases. This was not done just for “demonstration.” This was not done as a hobby. If their sentence was meant to be-little the work of TDI, which is how I do interpret that sentence, then is also belittles the work of CAA, DUSA(OR) and OSD PA&E. I am not sure that is the three author’s intent.

Physics-based Aspects of Combat

Continuing my comments on the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (this is part 4 of 7; see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

The next sentence in the article is interesting. After saying that validating models incorporating human behavior is difficult (and therefore should not be done?) they then say:

In combat simulations, those model components that lend themselves to empirical validation, such as the physics-based aspects of combat, are developed, validated, and verified using data from an accredited source.

This is good. But, the problem lies that it limits one to only validating models that do not include humans. If one is comparing a weapon system to a weapon system, as they discuss later, this is fine. On the other hand, if one is comparing units in combat to units in combat…then there are invariably humans involved. Even if you are comparing weapon systems versus weapon systems in an operational environment, there are humans involved. Therefore, you have to address human factors. Once you have gone beyond simple weapon versus weapon comparisons, you need to use models that are gaming situations that involved humans. I gather from the previous sentence (see part 3 of 7) and this sentence, that means that they are using un-validated models. Their extended discussions of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) that follows just reinforces that impression.

But, TRADOC is the training and doctrine command. They are clearly modeling something other than just the “physics-based aspect of combat.”

Validating Attrition

Continuing to comment on the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (this is part 3 of 7; see Part 1, Part 2)

On the first page (page 28) in the third column they make the statement that:

Models of complex systems, especially those that incorporate human behavior, such as that demonstrated in combat, do not often lend themselves to empirical validation of output measures, such as attrition.

Really? Why can’t you? If fact, isn’t that exactly the model you should be validating?

More to the point, people have validated attrition models. Let me list a few cases (this list is not exhaustive):

1. Done by Center for Army Analysis (CAA) for the CEM (Concepts Evaluation Model) using Ardennes Campaign Simulation Study (ARCAS) data. Take a look at this study done for Stochastic CEM (STOCEM): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a489349.pdf

2. Done in 2005 by The Dupuy Institute for six different casualty estimation methodologies as part of Casualty Estimation Methodologies Studies. This was work done for the Army Medical Department and funded by DUSA (OR). It is listed here as report CE-1: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm

3. Done in 2006 by The Dupuy Institute for the TNDM (Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model) using Corps and Division-level data. This effort was funded by Boeing, not the U.S. government. This is discussed in depth in Chapter 19 of my book War by Numbers (pages 299-324) where we show 20 charts from such an effort. Let me show you one from page 315:

 

So, this is something that multiple people have done on multiple occasions. It is not so difficult that The Dupuy Institute was not able to do it. TRADOC is an organization with around 38,000 military and civilian employees, plus who knows how many contractors. I think this is something they could also do if they had the desire.