OMEGA RHO
Distinguished Lecture
Operations Research in a New Era of National Security
Secretary of the Air Force James G. Roche critiques recent military OR practices and issues a challenge to "reinvigorate" the discipline
Secretary Roche holds a master's degree in operations research from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a doctoral degree in business administration from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
Prior to his appointment by President George W. Bush to oversee the 370,000 men and women on active duty in the Air Force (along with the 180,000 members of the Air Force Reserve and 160,000 civilians and their families), Secretary Roche held several executive positions (including president) with Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Secretary Roche served 23 years in the U.S. Navy, retiring with the rank of captain in 1983. His military assignments included principal deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, senior professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and assistant director for the Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment.
Following are excerpts from Secretary Roche's talk before a large and appreciative audience of INFORMS members.
In the Department of Defense, we are engaged in a healthy debate over the effective applications of military power in the strategic conditions in which we now find ourselves in this new era of new threats. In periods of great technological and geopolitical change, defense leaders require the right mechanisms for sharpening the intuitions and thought processes by which we approach the problems we face. In my current business, the U.S. Air Force, our institution is faced with a multitude of decisions — programmatic, technical, personnel, strategic, and yes, cultural — that we must make based on knowledge of, and respect for, the relevant underlying data. In that spirit, I'd like to talk about recent military operations and illustrate for you one perspective on how operations research and analysis are and will continue to contribute to national security decision-making. I'll also leave you with what I believe are some constructive criticisms of recent military OR practices.
I must first note, however, as one who labors in the Pentagon, that I could not be prouder of the job our men and women in uniform — in all services and at all ranks — have done in defending America in the current global war on terrorism. As Secretary of our nation's Air Force, I'm especially proud of our service's contributions to this joint, combined and coalition campaign. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the first military units to respond to the attacks [on the World Trade Center and Pentagon] were air defense aircraft from the North Dakota ANG (pre-deployed to Langley AFB, Virginia) and the Massachusetts Air National Guard, providing defensive combat air patrols over Washington and New York. Later that day, the entire nation was covered with a blanket of detection and defense. Millions of Americans across the country, although shaken, found the sound of military jets over their homes reassuring.
It wasn't long before we had the opportunity to take the fight to the enemy. We deployed thousands of troops to expeditionary bases in parts of the world previously unfamiliar to most of us, and to countries many of us couldn't pronounce, not to mention spell. We occupied or built over a dozen bases for our coalition operations and for our sister services, many of them in remote and austere environments and many in the backyard of our former adversaries. We flew — and continue to fly — tens of thousands of strike, reconnaissance and mobility sorties, delivering precision, intelligence and global reach. Meanwhile, we continued flying over the Continental United States. And, for the first time since 1823, European powers defended this land!
Advances in the science and technology of warfighting found practical and positive applications as well. Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles were employed for the first time in the history of war, and all sorts of "not ready for prime time" systems yielded a huge trove of operational successes. Integrating mechanisms, linked systems, software advances, target cueing algorithms and others helped us provide greater fidelity of the battlespace and deliver more precise effects faster than ever before.
And, in the midst of demanding expeditionary and combat operations, we delivered two and a half million humanitarian rations to the people of Afghanistan.
Although this war is far from over, and we are still in a very serious struggle as the recent bombings in Bali and Yemen and the murder of a U.S. Marine in Kuwait demonstrate, we're tightening the noose with every passing day, in spite of the desperate threats emanating from Osama bin Laden's fugitive tape recorder. The capture of key leaders and the arrests of terrorist operatives around the globe lead to more intelligence, better counter-terrorist operations, and ultimately, a decreased "base" for Al Qaeda, its followers and state sponsors. But we are not finished!
We are now vigorously preparing for the challenges that lie ahead. And we will be challenged. We remain threatened by terrorist attacks. But, as President Bush has clearly articulated, we will not sit idly by and wait for the next attack. When appropriate, we will take the fight to our enemies, wherever they hide, before they strike.
There is no denying that the world is a decidedly different place than the one we knew in the previous century of world wars and our long struggle against communism. It is a vitally important time in the history of our nation as we work to solve the challenges posed by global terrorism and other asymmetric threats.
We have new challenges today, challenges that were intensified, but not created, by the events of 9/11. Today, our adversaries' goals include creating terror through disruption of our economic system and by striking America and American interests at home and abroad. They also intend to continue to attack our friends and allies. And they have demonstrated an ability to attack with minimal resources relative to the mass devastation they can cause — the single greatest example of "cost-imposing strategy" in history. Think of the dollar ratio.
More troubling, in an era of stateless outlaws and outlaw states, these aggressors may be non-deterrable — at least by the traditional means we have employed to prevent wars among nations. And while we may not have recognized the full extent of the threat in the past, clearly our enemies have been engaged in a concerted campaign to kill innocent Americans, and our friends, and to harm our global interests for many years.
It is in this context that we in the Air Force view the role of the operations research and management sciences community. In our view, the Naval Postgraduate School got it right 50 years ago when it embarked on an endeavor to teach our future military leaders a new discipline we called "operations research." We were six years removed from World War II and coping with new technologies and operational concepts in a land, sea and air war in Asia. However, just as in the early 1950s, we need military leaders today who are capable of quick and insightful analysis of a wide variety of problems and issues.
We have a number of operational objectives — among them, defeating asymmetric attacks, countering anti-access strategies, and the need to find, fix, track and target elusive, mobile targets deep in inhospitable territory, very quickly — that require fresh intellectual energy. And future military leaders must be able to make timely, effective decisions, sometimes under conditions of great uncertainty, while accomplishing complex missions within highly constrained resources. No doubt many of you are familiar with H.G. Wells' uninspiring quote about intellect in the military: "The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling."
Military ops researchers, among others, have been proving Mr. Wells wrong for over 50 years. To excel in this rapidly changing warfare environment, we need leaders who have the technical acumen to understand the complexities of strategic, operational and tactical problems, and who can translate theory and innovation into combat readiness and effectiveness. We need leaders who understand that our new warfare environment will require all of our combat, intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, immigration, financial and communications resources.
Yes, 9/11 was an example of asymmetric warfare; and yes, we were surprised, even though many of us were working on responses to unconventional threats prior to that morning. In fact, that very morning I was having breakfast in the Pentagon with a member of Congress discussing the potential challenges posed by certain offshoots of Islamic fundamentalism. But we have been surprised before — at Pearl Harbor and Tet. As Roberta Wohlstetter said, "We shouldn't be surprised that we will be surprised."
This campaign entails a new style of warfare, and the analytical tools provided by ops research should contribute to our ability to meet the challenges by out-thinking our adversaries. While our problem set is very different from analyzing how to move merchant ships effectively back and forth across the Atlantic, finding submarines, tracking their movements, and deriving predictive models and effective countermeasures from such movements is a good point of departure in our hunter-killer operations against SCUD missile launchers, mobile command centers, mobile cruise-missile launchers or mobile surface-to-air missile systems.
As we deal with these new problems, we need to keep in mind that we "ops researchers" do not have an unblemished record. When I was earning my master's in ops research in 1964-1966, our country was sinking deep into the Big Muddy in Southeast Asia. Secretary McNamara, his "analysts" and his metrics gave an illusion of "success": shells exploded, sorties launched, targets engaged, bombs dropped, body counts — these measures of merit masked the true effectiveness, or more appropriately, ineffectiveness, of our actions.
Operations research, although touted at the time, was of little help because its tools were too slow and far too narrow to adapt to the demands of that era's asymmetric warfare. More generally, too often we focused only on first-order measures in our analysis. We suffered, and may continue to suffer, from a lack of deep understanding of hard lessons learned about many still relevant aspects of war. For example:
- John Kenneth Galbraith's conclusion that the Combined Bomber Offensive of World War II failed was a result of his insistence that the campaign's effectiveness be judged exclusively on the basis of quantitative indices of industrial output.
- The direct and predictable military effects of the 1942 Doolittle raid on Japan were so modest that it is possible to question whether the operation should have been mounted at all, particularly given the likely benefits, costs and risk it entailed, particularly to two of the four remaining carriers in the Pacific fleet, the Hornet and the Enterprise.
- Later, WEI/WUV scores (weapon effectiveness index and weighted unit value methodologies) used by PA&E (OSD Program Analysis and Evaluation) proved Israel lost every war; and that the Russians won at Kiev in 1941!
- The British at Saratoga (a major strategic failure and a turning point of the American Revolution);
- Tarleton versus Morgan at Cowpens (a decisive battle in the southern campaign of the American War of Independence);
- Hooker versus Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville (a Civil War battle in which General Robert E. Lee defied military convention and divided his outnumbered force, rushing most of his men west to halt the Federal advance);
- Or most of the Vietnam War (eerily similar to the calculus of our American Revolution; a possible total misconception of what expeditionary military power could achieve in an internecine conflict).
Somewhere along the line, this was lost as a fundamental concept of military operations analysis. The notion of operating on the calculus of an opponent (deterrence large and small) did not derive from ops research; it derives far more from a richer understanding of an opponent's history and culture. And, in business, managerial economics and decision theory explicitly account for preferences and hunches.
In the coming era, we who practice OR have to be smarter, or we will have just gotten older, and our fellow citizens and our friends in the world will lose confidence in us.
In the future, ops research — properly employed — could be even more important in helping us leverage combat capabilities for successful "effects-based" operations. The question isn't, Did the weapon hit the target? Rather, it is, Did the weapon, attack or campaign yield the desired effects? Just as my colleague General John Jumper, our Air Force Chief of Staff, has said, "We will never fight alone." We also will never build a single-purpose system again. His point, articulated so well, is "capabilities, not platforms." In the next decade, we plan to employ new multi-mission aircraft systems, highly integrated, with multi-spectral, fused sensors and robust, all-weather weapons delivery with increased standoff capability. We'll deploy with reduced logistics tails, and we'll attack with improved range, payload, speed, maneuverability and precision. Borrowing from portfolio analysis, we will network these systems in ways that enable us to find, fix, track, target, engage and assess in timelines unimaginable just a few years ago. Effectively, we will be flying "in the net."
We're now developing a range of systems that fulfill these objectives: the Multi-mission Command and Control Constellation, the smart tanker (starting with communications links and moving to various apertures), small "smart" weapons, and an entire generation of unmanned vehicles that take advantage of the comparative advantage of unmanned systems — range, persistence, digital acuity — to name just a few.
And I must also mention one system, conceived in the Cold War, that — as we are modifying it — nevertheless represents a leap forward in the transformation of our force, the F/A-22 Raptor multi-role strike system. With this "new" aircraft, retooled by both technology refreshment and refined concepts of operations, we'll bring stealth into the daylight; defeat the next two generations of air-to-air and surface-to-air threats, including cruise missiles; create a new electronic attack and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform; and dramatically multiply the effects of our air and ground forces, including special forces, deployed in hostile territory.
The story of our most recent planning exercise in answering the classic Alain Einhoven question — "How much is enough?" — on the F/A-22 is an example of how we are evolving our studies and analyses capabilities. We approached the F/A-22 study, which was directed by Secretary Rumsfeld, with delight, knowing that several aspects were "necessary conditions."
First, we did not want our analysts to go to work with a pre-ordained mission design or number of aircraft that they would endeavor to justify with analysis. We wanted the analysis to lead to the right number of aircraft and the right design balance. This may have made the work less comforting, but in the end it delivered a much richer product.
Also, our working groups needed a solid foundation of physics-based knowledge. This expertise was linked to test and exploitation programs by experts trained to understand the nuances of the system capabilities and the potential threat systems. We also added military strategists, political scientists and historians to the study teams.
Next, we needed a well-understood set of mission- and campaign-level tools focused on scenarios that had been identified by the combatant commanders, accompanied by solid intelligence data.
Finally, we needed a sound "resource assessment" process that allowed us to test specific investments and the imposition of various real-world budget constraints. However — and I know this group will understand — this was just the beginning.
General Jumper and I directed that independent analytic teams examine the best combat air force mix for the future. An innovative OR expert in campaign warfare stretched the bounds of current practice by developing a capabilities-based perspective rather than a threat-calibrated approach to derive a desired future fighter/attack force mix. We sought means to provide desired effects.
At the same time, our analysis teams examined the engagement- and mission-level profiles, examined the intelligence data on threat systems, and ran multiple variations of the operational concepts — each concept of operations illuminated by military history.
In parallel, other teams analyzed our rotational force structure demands and the requirements of our new national defense strategy. We employed tools that allowed decision-makers to determine the percentage of the force that would be deployed in support of various regions, the homeland security threat level, how we would posture our air forces, and the campaign requirements levied on our force. And, we invited an Army flag officer to join our team specifically to help us not to get intoxicated on our own bath water.
As difficult and as time consuming as this effort was, its results were worth it, regardless of how many F/A-22 aircraft this administration determines is "enough." Our working groups identified convergence of outcomes in our operational, business case and strategy analyses that became more stable over time. The complementary analyses helped our team identify a "sweet spot" where combinations of weapons and weapon systems provided a robust capability across multiple combinations of scenarios, and met Secretary Rumsfeld's baseline military guidance.
Our team was able to combine hundreds of plots into a risk tolerance curve that reflected the sensitivity of the analysis, allowing us to choose courses of action based on sound analysis. Doing the study also helped us change the way in which our various cultures think about the weapon system. It now is thought of in ways that are more relevant to the actual scenarios in which the F/A-22 will be used, particularly in the air-to-ground mode, against the most sophisticated defenses and time-urgent, mobile and pop-up targets. And it encouraged us to change the name of the aircraft, to continue the internal education process to help the next generation of pilots and leaders understand the system in its full context.
This is just one example of how we are using analysis to adjust to the new era of national security. We are embarking on a number of initiatives to bring analysis back to the forefront of military problem-solving and decision-making. For example, we're developing a Joint Synthetic (Virtual) Battlespace to meet the future demand for increased levels of visualization. It will provide a foundation for not only visualization for analytic purposes, but also for training purposes. And, it will form the core for distributed mission rehearsal, joint experimentation, and a natural link with operational capability assessments.
The foundation of our collective success, however, does not change. If I could leave a caution it would be this: All the technology in the world cannot translate to real warfighting capability unless we train and prepare warfighters and analysts well. For this reason, we are operationalizing analysis.
Warfighters must be exposed and trained on how to understand the power and limitations of analysis. And, we need to focus much more effort on training people how to think more strategically, both as analysts and as warfighters.
That is why we want our best and brightest operators to rub shoulders with analysts over the course of their careers. The analysts must have absolutely solid training in the foundations of OR. And, they must be provided the opportunity for operational experiences — opportunities for the analysts to rub shoulders and train with warfighters.
We have put one program in place for young analysts to serve tours in our combined air operations centers, providing analysis directly to the warfighters, even as the battle unfolds. In the long run, we need analysts who are themselves warfighters, not just staff analysts. And, here I may be rattling, if not breaking, some more china in my Air Force family's cupboard, but the new Air Force culture devised by this Secretary and the current Chief of Staff is one where we openly will debate the notion, come to closure, and make any appropriate changes.
I am a strong supporter of professional military education, and the education of professional military officers and senior enlisted airmen. We continually are looking at ways to strengthen the curricula of our service academy; ROTC units, war colleges and command and staff colleges, special schools and graduate programs such as the Air Force Institute of Technology and the Naval Postgraduate School. By the way, both of these schools continue to have superb OR programs. The real challenge for leadership is to free up operators to be able to attend these programs.
I'd like to see us widen the doors of these institutions to more of our officers and some of our senior enlisted airmen, at least at AFIT. I want these schools to broaden our officers and not narrow them. And, if OR is to be as highly regarded 50 years from now as it once was in the past, then it must return to some basics, like interdisciplinary teams dealing with incommensurates, and second- and third-order effects. For instance, we will never do a great job of understanding future battle space unless we return to our roots of balancing the quantifiable and non-quantifiable, as well as facts and probability distributions.
Finally, we need to do more work on those low probability but high impact events that could lead to success or failure at the strategic, operational and/or tactical levels of war. OR does best looking at repetitive plays of the game. Strategies based on portfolio thinking, hedging strategies, and — yes — chess may be more relevant to the emerging threat. And, in some cases, better understanding of an opponent may lead to strategies for dealing with "Prisoner's Dilemma-like" situations which are different than those we are used to.
In these times of conflict against a new kind of enemy, we must reexamine how we think, and adapt to a very messy form of warfare. We need thinkers, leaders and professional military officers of high intellect — despite the notion of H.G. Wells that none such officer exists — because this is a new kind of war for our nation and we cannot fail if we are to preserve freedom. We need to give tools to our warfighters so they can out-think, out-maneuver and out-live the enemy.
There is a real and significant role for ops research and systems analysis in the campaign in which we are engaged. This campaign also requires knowledge of history, economics, religion, finance, psychology, technology, game theory and decision analysis, among many other disciplines.
Years from now, some may ask, Was the operations research community up to the challenge? And did the discipline make the difference we hoped it would? In a moment of pre-posterior optimism, I think the community will adapt and prove itself as relevant to military thinking in this century, as it did in the past century.
Napoleon once noted, "There is a gift of being able to see at a glance the possibilities offered by the terrain... it is inborn in great generals. "
Of course, the conqueror of Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, also had this spirit in mind when he noted, "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill.' "
To Napoleon, the great analyst was born that day. Wellington, on the other hand, recognized that this is something you need to work on throughout your life. As I finish, I challenge you — dear colleagues — to adjust to this new environment, and to continue to meet the challenges of our new era by reinvigorating our field with the spirit and drive that led to its creation.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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