Military utility: A proposed concept to support decision-making

Highlights

• A concept for “Military Utility” to support decision-making is defined and proposed.

• It increases the understanding for how military capabilities are affected by technology use and development.

• It can be used for both qualitative and quantitative assessments.

Abstract

A concept called Military Utility is proposed for the study of the use of technology in military operations. The proposed concept includes a three-level structure representing key features and their detailed components. On basic level the Military Utility of a technical system, to a military actor, in a specific context, is a compound measure of the military effectiveness, of the assessed technical system's suitability to the military capability system and of the affordability. The concept is derived through conceptual analysis and is based on related concepts used in social sciences, the military domain and Systems Engineering. It is argued that the concept has qualitative explanatory powers and can support military decision-making regarding technology in forecasts, defense planning, development, utilization and the lessons learned process. The suggested concept is expected to contribute to the development of the science of Military-Technology and to be found useful to actors related to defense.

Introduction

For Clausewitz, in his masterly analysis of the mental and physical spheres of war, neglected the material--man's tools. If he thereby ensured to his work an enduring permanence, he also, if unwittingly, ensured permanent injury to subsequent generations who allowed themselves to forget that the spirit cannot win battles when the body has been killed through failure to provide it with up-to-date weapons [1,p.158].

New requirements and challenges are born from strained military budgets and a rapidly changing world, as well as from the fact that the time when the military industry was in the forefront of technological development has passed in most areas. In Sweden, and probably in most other democratic states, the question of how limited resources should be put to best use is more relevant than ever before. In general, a military system is complex and already its early life cycle stages, from R&D to initial operation, span over several years and often a decade. After that a typical platform on land, at sea or in the air has an operational lifetime of perhaps thirty years or more. Hence, decisions today may influence warfighting capacity for decades.

Our first case of a decision situation is the technology forecast. Even before the technical system is born as a concept, armed forces have to make decisions about what technologies to invest their limited R&D budget in. This means there is a need to forecast and predict the utility of technologies as part of a potential technical system in some far away uncertain future.

The second case is defense planning. In short to midterm defense planning, i.e. the next ten-year period, decision makers are faced with the question of when and with what technical systems to replace those currently in operation, while keeping within budget restraints. Furthermore it has to be done taking requirements from interdependent capabilities and foreseen doctrinal, tactical and organizational development into account–optimizing the whole capability system.

The third case is development. Once in the concept, development and production life cycle stages of a technical system, the question of how to build a technical system of maximum utility to the customer, the armed forces, within a limited time frame and budget, is addressed using requirement management within the systems engineering process.

The fourth case is use. In the utilization and support stage of a materiel system, military commanders and their staffs plan the best use of their limited resources in order to maximize the probability of mission success. Concretely, during planning, a staff is typically required to assess what capability systems, i.e. units and technology, the opponent is likely to use based on their strengths and vulnerabilities. Assessing own strengths and weaknesses in the situation the staff is likewise asked to recommend the best use of own available capabilities, not least based on expected technical performance.

The fifth case regards lessons learned. This is the long-term review of systems and capabilities throughout all stages from technology forecast, development, defense planning and use. The lessons learned process must be executed in close collaboration with the system stakeholder in order to be accurate in validation of system performance and capability but also to be accurate in the time domain helping decision makers get near-real time information regarding the utility development of the system-in-focus.

In light of the above illustrated incentives for competence in decision making, Military-technology is developing as an academic subject at the Swedish National Defence University, SEDU, defined as:

“Military- Technology is the science which describes and explains how technology influences military activity at all levels and how the profession of an officer affects and is affected by technology” [2].

It seems, though, that in every project similar analytic constructs have to be defined over and over with moderate adjustments to application. And evidently there are similarities between central questions in all the presented use cases from decision situations above. But, is it then possible to form a common theory, to support decision-making regarding use of technology in military affairs, from R&D investments to military operational planning? A more complete Military Technology conceptual apparatus would make it easier to relate to theories across academia, e.g. to economics or management sciences. It would certainly aid effective communication across disciplines within the defense community, i.e. between actors within military research agencies, the armed forces, procurement agencies and industry.

With this paper we intend to propose a concept with potential for both qualitative and quantitative analysis to support decision-making in military technology. The concept is named Military Utility. The starting point is a presentation of the postulates of Military Technology and the theory of concept analysis. After that an applied method for concept analysis is presented followed by a description of the resulting concept. The center of gravity is the following discussion on the concept dimensions and indicators. The paper ends with an example, final conclusions and proposed future work.