Military utility : A proposed concept to support decision-making

TL;DR: In this article, a concept called Military Utility is proposed for the study of the use of technology in military operations, which is derived through conceptual analysis and is based on related concepts used in social sciences, the military domain and Systems Engineering.

About: This article is published in Technology in Society.The article was published on 2015-11-01 and is currently open access. It has received 19 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Concept of operations & Technical performance measure.

Summary

1 Introduction

• 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.
• Hence, decisions today may influence warfighting capacity for decades.
• 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 starting point is a presentation of the postulates of Military Technology and the theory of concept analysis.

2 Military-Technology

• The technology the military profession chooses, and how it uses that technology, will affect the outcome on the battlefield and the sustainment of capabilities over time.
• The authors viewpoint originates from postulates in militarytechnology [3]: the character of war change in pace with the development of technology, technology has influence on all military command levels, and a lack of understanding of technology causes diminishing military opportunities.
• The terminology used originates from these and the aim is to propose a concept in harmony with the use of related concepts within these disciplines.
• Coming from a Systems Engineering tradition viewing problem phenomena as Systems is fundamental.
• These elements include products (hardware, software, firmware), processes, people, information, techniques, facilities, services, and other support elements”[5].

3 Concepts development and Concept Analysis

• The above identified need for a concept is based on the view of them fulfilling several important functions within the scientific community.
• A conclusion is that how a concept is designed constitutes not only the building blocks of theories, but also affects how the phenomena are measured and examined.
• Goertz concludes that “the basic and secondary levels are really the theory of the concept, while the indicator level is the connection to measures and data collection”[8, pp. 5–10].
• Several guidelines exist on how to conduct Concept Analysis [14].
• Goertz’s guidelines have similarities to Sartori´s ten rules for concepts analysis as well as to part of Walker’s and Avant’s method[10].

4 The Concept Of Military Utility

• The concept analysis resulted in a proposed concept labeled “Military Utility”; where the conceptual definition is captured in a Goertz-diagram, see figure1.
• Desired outcomes constitute the purpose of the mission.
• Schedule, cost and risk objectives are boundary conditions.
• Military Suitability in turn is operationalized using measures of the degree to which the EoI fits together with other elements of the resulting capability.
• In the model above, indicators corresponding to TEPIDOIL (Training, Equipment, Personnel, Infrastructure, Concepts and Doctrine, Organization, Information and Logistics) illustrate possible elements on this level.

5 Dimensions and Indicators

• The Military Utility concept should support a stakeholder’s decision-making concerning the use of technology in military activities.
• I.e. the dimensions and indicators, is presented capturing the most important argumentation from the concept development seminars.
• The starting point is, however, the top most level and a discussion on the input to an assessment, the situational variables.

5.1 Military Utility - Basic level

• ´Utility´ was considered a plausible best fit to the proposed concept, since it is used throughout the three domains covered by military-technology with a general sense of supporting decisions.
• According to the Oxford Dictionary, Utility means “the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial”[15].
• This definition indicates that the multipurpose aspect is essential.
• This does not always have to be true in their intended application, at least not when the artifact or technical system is analyzed within a given environment.
• SE concepts like ‘Operational Effectiveness’ [17] or ‘Cost Effectiveness’ [18] were discarded because they are considered special cases of Military Utility.

5.1.1 What is the Element of Interest?

• The technical specification is one factor as well as the military context.
• To obtain military utility during a battle the artillery gun needs a functional logistic system as well as a functional communication system between the target acquisition system and the fire unit (e.g. an artillery observation team).
• The artillery gun does not exist in a vacuum and therefore its utility cannot be assessed as a single unit.
• Another consequence of the system approach is that the component of military technological interest is not always the technical element itself but an element interacting with the technical element, e.g. the doctrine or the organization.
• A challenge is that the same technology could appear in multiple technical systems.

5.1.2 Who is the military actor using the EoI?

• The prefix “Military” is used to signal the use of the concept to support military decisionmakers – having military capabilities, goals and objectives.
• At higher command levels the Military Utility at lower command levels † will have to be included, though, making this a more complex assessment.
• When used by, for example, procurement agencies or the industry, the concept should be understood as being their assessment of the utility from a specific military actor’s point of view.

5.1.4 Concept level measurement considerations

• Bernoulli assumed already in the 18 th century through the St Petersburg paradox that maximizing an individual’s income is not the same as maximizing the utility (Bernoulli 1738).
• The utility one person can have of a specified amount of money is consequently not the same as that of the next person.
• The military utility of artillery is related to the combined armed forces.
• System A has arguably greater Military Utility than system B in this context and hence a continuous scale can be applied to the concept.
• Examining the scale further the authors find that an alternative EoI that yields no better probability of achieving the organizational goals than status quo, nor at a lower cost, should be considered ‘useless’.

5.2.1 Military Effectiveness Dimension

• The first dimension of a utility concept has to account for the purpose of using the assessed EoI at all, i.e. the military mission.
• Hence, it is only meaningful to discuss military utility if the capability, to which the EoI contributes, has any potential of being effective in a given context.
• Wasson explains this concept as the requirement of a system to be able to support missions “to a level of performance that makes it operationally effective in terms of accomplishing organizational goals and objectives, namely outcomes, cost, schedule, and risk.”[18].
• The prefix is however changed to ‘Military´.
• In summary the Military Effectiveness dimension is a measure of the overall ability to accomplish a mission when the EoI is used by representative personnel in the environment planned or expected for operational employment of the military force.

5.2.2 Military Suitability Dimension

• The second dimension of Military Utility produces the means to analyze the relation between the EoI and the other elements of the capability system.
• An EoI with low suitability to the other components in the Armed Forces capability system would arguably be of little use, e.g. there is no trained personnel to use the system, the Command and Control system is not compatible, there is no doctrine for how to utilize possible benefits, there are no facilities to maintain the EoI etc.
• It should very well be possible to add suitability from national or international law to the list.
• Instead the following definition is chosen: Military Suitability is the degree to which an EoI can be satisfactorily placed in military use in a specified context with consideration to interaction with other elements of the capability system.

5.2.3 Affordability Dimension

• The third dimension of the Military Utility concept accounts for the consequences of having limited funding.
• A determination that the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of an acquisition program is in consonance with the long-range investment and force structure plans of the DoD or individual DoD components.
• ‘Affordability’ is hence more suitable than ‘Cost’ to represent the limited resources dimension of the concept, since it has a positive direction, like effectiveness and suitability.
• As an illustration, assume that a military actor tries to find the solution with maximum military utility.
• In use cases where the Military Utility of an EoI is assessed supporting a specific military operation the affordability dimension is omitted.

5.3 Operationalization – Indicator level

• The operationalization of the dimensions of military utility is the bridge between the conceptual-theoretical and the empirical-observational level.
• During concept development the ambition was to find generic clusters of indicators, rather than indicators themselves.
• The indicators finally chosen for an assessment will be dependent on use case and context.

5.3.1 Indicators to Military Effectiveness

• Leaning on existing definitions the effectiveness of a capability relates to the ability to reach desired effects stated in objectives for “outcomes, cost, schedule, and risk”[18].
• This can be exemplified using the aircraft decision situation again.
• This seems rational since this aircraft type is effective in all types of combat air operations needed to defend Swedish territory: counter air, air strike or reconnaissance – probably weighted in that order.
• All other limiting resources for using the capability have to be accounted for in the effectiveness dimension, and they have to be defined as cost objectives.
• In the scope of this paper it is sufficient to state that there are typically four types of substitutable indicators contributing to Military Effectiveness: Compliance to desired outcomes, Compliance to Cost, Compliance to Schedule and Compliance to Risk.

5.3.2 Indicators to Military Suitability

• According to Wasson Measures of Suitability (MoS) are “Objective performance measures derived from subjective user criteria for assessing a system’s operational suitability to the organizational and mission applications”[18].
• Doctrin, Organisation, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel and Facilities, also known as USA uses DOTMLPF.
• Evidently, there are different ways of how to view capabilities and hence the concept should not dictate which architecture to use and thereby what indicators of military suitability to include.
• If, for example, the British army had made a correct analysis of the Military Utility of the battle tank before they used it for the first time in World War I perhaps the outcome would have been another [30].
• The compound measure is in turn a function of indicators quantifying the EoI fit with other elements of the capability.

5.3.3 Indicators of Affordability

• “Life cycle cost (LCC) represents all the costs that will be borne during the life of a System (Main System and Support System) to acquire, operate, support it and eventually dispose of it.
• There are other measures of ownership cost than LCC.
• In conclusion, measures for ownership cost are very well examined and if having a budget of reference and an estimated ownership cost it should be rather straightforward to obtain a measure for Affordability.
• The Affordability must, ultimately, be weighed together with the Military Effectiveness and Military Suitability in order to form a balanced measure of Military Utility.

5.3.4 Measurement considerations

• Though the concept allows a scalar assessment this is not necessarily the best way to present an assessment of military utility.
• The compounding process would assumedly involve assigning weighting factors to dimensions on the secondary level and then summing globally to get the result.
• Or the elements of the matrix need not even be numbers.
• Expressing assessments in scalars has advantages, e.g. when doing multiple simulations or doing some sensitivity analysis of the results.
• But an analyst has to keep in mind that humans are never unbiased, why the quality of the decision does not necessarily improve with a seemingly neutral scalar assessment.

5.3.5 The new Swedish Armored Wheeled Vehicle (AWV) decision situation

• In the end there were two remaining concepts competing for the contract, the Patria and the Nexter concepts.
• One could say that the evaluation model in the example is one operationalization of the Military Utility concept fitted for administration of an acquisition program.
• That decision-model, for the example above, was however not available for scrutiny.

6 Conclusions

• This phenomenon, dealing with the technology the military profession chooses, and how it uses that technology, affects the outcome on the battlefield and the sustainment of capabilities over time.
• The concept is needed to aid effective communication within the defense community and to support decision-making.
• Military Utility is a function of three situational variables: the Element of Interest, the Military Actor and the Context.
• The Military Effectiveness dimension is a measure of the overall ability to accomplish a mission when the EoI is used by representative personnel in the environment planned or expected for operational employment of the military force.
• Hence the concept, accompanied by appropriate frameworks and methods, can support military decision-making regarding technology in these areas.

Figures

Table 2 presents the resulting evaluation of the two final competing tenders for the new Swedish AWV. The compound figure of merit for the two concepts, calculated using the evaluation model enclosed in the RFQ, is presented on the bottom line. [33]

Table 1 presents the evaluation parameters, with weights on the top indicator level, in the evaluation model for tenders in the procurement of new armored wheeled vehicles for the Swedish army [32, Pt. E].

Fig. 1 The resulting Military Utility concept modeled in a Goertz-diagram

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Military utility, a proposed concept to support decision-making" ?

A concept called Military Utility is proposed for the study of the use of technology in military operations. 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. 

Q2. What are the future works in "Military utility, a proposed concept to support decision-making" ?

Future research is needed to further validate the concept. This will be done addressing relevant decision situations and fitting frameworks of indicators and methods to specific problems and applications.