Connections 2003

Lecture:
Modeling the Impacts of Information

by Russ Lockwood


Presented by Jim Dunnigan

You can do a game on anything and everything by getting raw data, modeling it, and presenting it. Tom Shaw of Avalon Hill once challenged Dunnigan to make a game on getting lost in the woods: the result was Outdoor Survival.

For the US Air Force, one of the biggest tasks it must perform is Bomb Damage Assessment, for it forms the basis of mission planning during a campaign. Unfortunately, the USAF has a problem with BDA: it churns out press releases to avoid discussions about their BDA procedures.

The enemy, or Red Team for the purpose of simulations, has a huge incentive to camoflage actual BD. WWII strategic bombing didn't affacte the Germans as much as we thought--their production peaked in 1944 as the heaviest raids went in. CIA BDA noted that Korean War deceptions worked well--for example, Operation Strangler...didn't. In the 1990s, a number of books by North Vietnamese officers told how proud they were of the tricks they designed to fool US bombers. Kosovo was an embarrassment of falling for recycled WWII German tricks. As for Gulf War I, we owned the sky, and while a considerable amount of damage was inflicted, we ended up owning the battlefield for the next generation of press releases.

In a BDA simulation of historical examples, the bombing team showed persistence and accuracy in combing through raw data, but the enemy team acted smarter as the simulation went on. In a sense, it validated the system in place and built the confidence of the bomber team, but also created a tool set for the opposing force. If you can't assess the past, you can't predict the future.

Nuclear bombs changed the idea of war, although by itself, because it was not used after WWII, the emphasis went back to infantry. No one weapon ever changed the warfare forever. Eventually, another weapon would counter the effects or supercede the whatever new weapon was introduced. For example, while infrared is all the rage now, the enemy can mess with the technology by creating lots of small heat sources.

The tools of camoflage may change, but the idea for deceiving the enemy remains the same.

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