: When groups of platforms, sensors, and weapons are able to communicate with each other in real-time, they form a network. Modern warfare increasingly involves network-centric operations, the military strategy that seeks to translate informational advantages gained through the cooperation of all platforms in the network into increased overall mission effectiveness. For this thesis, the Time-to-Kill is our metric to quantify mission effectiveness because a given time-sensitive target is vulnerable to attack only for a very short time. This thesis develops an optimizing heuristic kill chain assessment tool, "KCAT," that (a) rapidly identifies capability gaps and (b) generates guaranteed feasible schedules that minimize the time-to-kill for a given air-to-ground strike scenario. KCAT allows warfare analysts, budget programmers, and mission planners to quantitatively examine the value of network-centric warfare in time-sensitive targeting scenarios. In addition to optimizing existing platform and weapon network effectiveness, KCAT allows experimentation with future concepts and capabilities that are important for informing procurement and training decisions.

Optimizing the Air-to-Ground Kill Chain for Time-Sensitive Targets

https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/10945/6933/3/NPS-SE-07-008.pdf

An Analysis of the Open Architecture Warfare System Domain Model for surface time critical targets

With the advent of the Big Data era, the specialized data in the kill chain domain has increased dramatically, and the engine-based method of retrieving information can hardly meet the users' need for more accurate answers. The kill chain domain includes four components: control equipment, sensor equipment, strike equipment (weapon and platform), and evaluator equipment, as well as related data which contain a large amount of valuable information such as the parameter information contained in each component. If these fragmented and confusing data are integrated and effective query methods are established, they can help professionals complete the military kill chain knowledge system. The knowledge system constructed in this paper is based on the Neo4j graph database and the US Command simulation system to establish a target-oriented knowledge map of kill chain, aiming to provide data support for the Q&A system. Secondly, in order to facilitate the query, this paper establishes entity and relationship/attribute mining based on the continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) encoding model, bidirectional long short-term memory–conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF) named entity model, and bidirectional gated recurrent neural network (BiGRU) intent recognition model for Chinese kill chain question and answer; returns the corresponding entity or attribute values in combination with the knowledge graph triad form; and finally constructs the answer return. The constructed knowledge map of the kill chain contains 2767 items (including sea, land, and air), and the number of parameters involved is 30124. The number of model parameters of the deep learning network is 27.9 M for the Q&A system built this time, and the accuracy rate is 85.5% after 200 simulated queries.

Military Chain: Construction of Domain Knowledge Graph of Kill Chain Based on Natural Language Model

: The ability of unmanned aerial vehicles to execute intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting and strike missions creates a trade-space decision for naval aviation programmatic decision makers. In the militarys current fiscal climate, manned and unmanned aircraft compete for limited funding. This study takes a simulation approach using the simulation modeling framework based on intelligent objects (SIMIO) environment to model a fast attack craft/fast inshore attack craft anti-surface warfare expanded kill chain. It tests and analyzes multiple manned and unmanned aircraft configurations. In the evaluation of unclassified concepts of operation and use of unclassified data sources, results indicate that aircraft attrition due to hostile weapon engagements is the dominant factor in the determination of concept of operation efficiency. Based on the operational environment, low cost and less capable unmanned aircraft provide an alternative to the increased survivability of manned aircraft or more capable and higher cost unmanned aircraft. We provide quantifiable metrics that enable the efficient and effective selection of aircraft to execute fast attack craft/fast inshore attack craft anti-surface warfare kill chains.

Manned and Unmanned Aircraft Effectiveness in Fast Attack Craft / Fast Inshore Attack Craft ASUW Kill Chain Execution

The Kill Chain is of great significance in forming systemic combat capabilities and improving combat effectiveness. Aiming at the evaluation of Kill Chain operational effectiveness, an evaluation indicator system is constructed. Principal components analysis is used to filtrate the original evaluation indicators, and the main indicators affecting the effectiveness of the kill chain are determined; afterwards, the evaluation model is established based on entropy weight method and Analytic Hierarchy Process. A quantitative assessment is conducted using kill chains formed by actual weapons, which verifies that the model is effective and feasible. Keywords—kill chain; PCA; AHP; effectiveness evaluation

/pdf/effectiveness-evaluation-of-kill-chain-based-on-pca-ahp-and-1zv0rmbbul.pdf

Effectiveness Evaluation of Kill Chain Based on PCA, AHP and Entropy Weight Method

: The detection and destruction of Time-Critical Targets (TCTs) has been a challenge for our military. NAVAIR has investigated a future time-critical strike (TCS) architecture and concept of operations (CONOPS) in order to explore the effectiveness of high-speed weapons against TCTs. NAVAIR has implemented an architecture and CONOPS in a simulation model. This thesis extends NAVAIR's work by developing flexible models and exploring the effects that alternative CONOPS may have on high-speed weapon requirements and system performance against TCTs. The TCTs are a single wave of theater ballistic missile (TBM) transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that appear over a short time interval and can saturate the command and control architectures considered. For the architecture and alternative CONOPS explored, it is difficult to improve upon the performance of the baseline TCS system developed of NAVAIR.

/pdf/an-analysis-of-the-kill-chain-for-time-critical-strike-1gtcoi2h2y.pdf

William K. Brickner

Papers

An analysis of the kill chain for time critical strike