New insight into doctrine via simulation interoperation of heterogeneous levels of models in battle experimentation

Abstract

As the complexity of military operations increases, defense modeling and simulation (DM&S) has contributed in analytically improving doctrines at various levels. To date, defense modelers concentrate on the best representation model of their targeted system at their targeted level with their targeted doctrine. However, insights into the doctrine from the battle experiment using such models are limited by the represented world of the model, and the modelers are missing potential insights into the doctrine that they might have gained if they had included more features in the models. Hence, this paper illustrates a battle experiment framework via the simulation interoperation of the heterogeneous levels of models. Our application is developing a mission-level doctrine for naval air defense scenarios, but a mission-level model alone does not represent the whole picture of the scenarios, and the model only represents the command and control (C2) procedures in detail, not the mechanical- and the engagement level features. On the other hand, an engagement-level model depicts some of the missing parts of the scenarios in the mission-level model. Our finding is that we can gain new insights, that is, an optimal decision-making timing of C2, into the mission-level doctrine from performing battle experiments by interoperating two such models at the mission and the engagement levels. We expect that this work will provide a new methodology for battle experiments by extending the limitation of single-model representation of the real world.