Modeling the Chaos of Battle

Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading global consulting firm, and has 19,000 employees serving clients on six continents. Booz Allen helps government and commercial clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. The company boasts of a full range of consulting capabilities. One of the projects that the firm has assisted the U.S. military with is the development of a combat simulator (wargame), which went into active service in 1997. The firm’s web site describing this model can be found at: http://www.boozallen.com/capabilities/services/services_article/1440526?lpid=39070430

Booz Allen Hamilton has developed an Entropy-Based Warfare model that is used to create hypothetical wargaming situations reflecting the US military's vision of future warfare, in which the country's Armed Services increasingly embrace cutting-edge technologies to help achieve an advantage over adversaries. The entropy-based warfare model simulates the combined effects of friction, disruption, and lethality found in the modern battlefield in the adversary’s behavior. Developed jointly with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and unveiled in 1997, it's a computerized tool capable of modeling the full range of military actions (including conflict in the air, sea, ground, space, and cyberspace domains) in a single, integrated manner that (according to the company) better represents future warfare.

Virtually all previous models, simulations, and wargames were fundamentally attrition based and lacked the ability to account for the effects of friction and disruption that could be achieved by various other means short of physical or lethal force. Analytically they often provided quantitative results that support one recommendation over another. But they did not account for many factors that affect the outcome. The few that did quantify factors like command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, jamming, and reconnaissance lack an analytic construct to accurately account for their effects. They simply measured the influence of these factors as increases or decreases in attrition.

Currently most military conflict models continue to ignore such key factors in military strength as unit cohesion: esprit de corps, morale, morale influence, training, and discipline. One of the issues I see with the entropy-based warfare model developed by Booz Allen Hamilton is the degree of bias from the users who set the various levels of unit cohesion in the simulations. U.S. military planners have often over or under estimated an adversary’s qualities in these capabilities, often with tragic results.

The Booz Allen Hamilton entropy-based warfare model simulates the destruction or interference with an adversary’s C3CM (Command, Control, Communications, and Counter Measures) as having effect on an enemy unit in three crucial areas:
Maneuver derogation (slowing response time to adversary’s actions)
Disorganization (loss of unit cohesion – inability to coordinate actions, etc)
Critical function destruction (or attrition / destruction of assets)
A real word example of entropy-based warfare would be causing all three effects by destroying a unit’s command staff through combat action (physical destruction). Another means would be to isolate the command staff from coordinating their unit by systematically jamming all of their communications. Jamming is not currently considered in most warfare models as a variable. Some of the other variable not considered by most conflict models include: psychological operations and other information warfare techniques, stealth or camouflage, deception, signals intelligence, and reconnaissance activities. In essence, most models fail to account for what Clausewitz termed “the fog of war”.

The objective of the entropy-based warfare model is to teach command staff to again introduce the “fog of war” into the adversary’s concerns while keeping our own collection assets and command activities intact to ensure the effects of the “fog of war” are not felt by friendly forces. Previously existing military simulations failed to emphasize the importance of these force multipliers. The purpose of the new simulation is to reintroduce the effects of blitzkrieg into the modern battlefield. The use of the previously mentioned force multipliers can have the same paralyzing effects on an adversary’s forces as those witnessed by the allies in the opening moves of the Second World War. Some of the effect include: demoralization of the enemy, inducing the inability of enemy units to react to the changing situation, disrupting the enemy’s ability to coordinate activities which can lead to uncoordinated counter attacks and the encirclement of their forces, etc...

Previous wargaming models failed to take into account some aspects of the criticality of speed of operations. Modern computer supported command and control functions allow U.S. forces to maintain a far more rapid tempo of operations because of the speed in planning operations, and the dissemination of plans and intelligence. Modern precision munitions and stealth aircraft capabilities allows deep strikes against key enemy command and control assets with almost assured destruction. Jamming allows the isolation of those enemy assets whose command and control functions cannot be accurately located. The use of the entropy-based warfare model should help to reinforce our military commander’s use and reliance on these largely ignored assets.

The entropy-based warfare model captures neglected aspects of conflict that previous military simulations overlooked. Where previous attrition based models primarily emphasized quantity, the entropy-based warfare model creates a more balanced and advanced view of the modern battlefield and reinforces the use of the assets central to the success of U.S. forces. The new Booz Allen Hamilton simulation is a step forward in the advancement of military war-games. It fills a void in the use of several previously ignored force multipliers. The system still however does not simulate the need for other support services such as supply, medical evacuation, etc. For a command to properly function in combat, these variables also need to be addressed.