Choice of Pay-Offs for Military Operations of the Future

Abstract

Studies which relate to decisions affecting the course of possible military operations in the distant future face the familiar pitfalls of operations research in a particularly aggravated form, due principally to the broad context in which such decisions typically appear. This paper discusses means for avoiding undesirable suboptimization, for including the effects of feedback and competition, and for introducing the effect of significant constraints when choosing criteria on which to base long-range planning decisions. Several new measures of merit are presented which emphasize the feature of “R and D” leverage over potential enemy countermeasure developments. For decisions affecting possible near-term military operations, it is suggested that operations-research studies can profitably emphasize the optimization of (a) deployment of existing forces, (b) military decision-making processes. These near-term problems, like their long-term counterparts, must also be studied with reference to future goals.