Copyright by Joshua Monroe Keena 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Joshua Monroe Keena certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Demonstration of Decision Support Tools for Evaluating Ground Combat System Survivability, Lethality, and Mobility at the Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Levels of War Committee: ______________________________ Tess J. Moon, Supervisor ______________________________ Matthew I. Campbell ______________________________ Eric P. Fahrenthold ______________________________ Harry D. Fair ______________________________ Paul E. Funk ______________________________ John R. Howell Demonstration of Decision Support Tools for Evaluating Ground Combat System Survivability, Lethality, and Mobility at the Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Levels of War by Joshua Monroe Keena, B.S.; M.S.E. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2011 Dedication To the Keena family: my wife Patricia; my children Gianna and Joshua… with love Joshua M. Keena Acknowledgments I consider myself very fortunate to have received expert direction and discerning support from my dissertation supervisor, Professor Tess Moon. The insightful guidance and careful mentoring she afforded me throughout the exploration of this dissertation topic were crucial to the conduct of the research. Professor Moon was exceptionally generous with her time, and I benefited from each of our discussions. I wish to thank Professor John Howell for sharing his wisdom and challenging me to explore the utility of this work in a contemporarily predictive fashion. Professor Eric Fahrenthold’s prior experience with aerospace and military research projects spurred the inclusion of a financial aspect to this analysis. His early feedback proved invaluable during a military equipment fielding mission in Afghanistan, where I was better prepared to consider these research concepts with a monetary focus. Dr. Mathew Campbell helped to identify the competing demands inherent among the various management levels in the military. I am grateful for his intuitive reflections regarding a stratified approach to quantifying ground combat system attributes, as well as the distinctive interests he identified for each level. I will forever be indebted to Dr. Harry Fair for the encouragement and prudence he afforded me while I served as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology. Our military is stronger because of the vision and passion he imbued into the technological endeavors his institute pioneered. I would like to sincerely thank Lieutenant General (Retired) Paul Funk for sharing his wealth of experience regarding how to best leverage technology for our armed forces. Dr. Funk inspired me to keep the soldier considerations for advanced capabilities as the vanguard for analysis—a tribute to his leadership style and a vital element of all successful military designs. v I would like to acknowledge Dr. Olga Nuño of the University of Texas at Austin Office of Research Support, and Dr. Francis Stefani of the Institute for Advanced Technology, for their guidance in preparing the Institutional Review Board materials for this study. Zimmery Williams, program coordinator for the Intermediate Qualification Course, was very helpful in hosting two survey exercises with Army officers. Lieutenant Colonel Wilber Richburg of the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation, and Larry Leggett of the Defense Acquisition University, were supportive and informative with respect to the vehicle prototyping and simulation software used in this research. I am grateful to Tom Friou, also of the Institute for Advanced Technology, for his assistance in the requisition of hardware used for the experiments. Thanks to Greg Jewett and his staff at the Institute for Advanced Technology for the time and effort spent preparing the mobile workstations used during the experiments. Mike Nomura, research librarian at the Institute for Advanced Technology, helped secure a host of obscure references as well as provided great advice on search methods. I am very appreciative of the time and effort put forth by the leaders and cadets of the University of Texas at Austin Longhorn ROTC Battalion while serving as mission operators during the experimental exercises. To the staff, scientists, and engineers at the Institute for Advanced Technology, thank you all very much for sharing your technical expertise during the past five years. I benefited greatly from the depth of knowledge and the collective wisdom of the dedicated researchers at this institute. Finally, I would like to thank Sandra Spicher for the time she spent editing several draft versions of this manuscript. To that end, any errors that remain are my own. August 2011 vi Demonstration of Decision Support Tools for Evaluating Ground Combat System Survivability, Lethality, and Mobility at the Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Levels of War Joshua Monroe Keena, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Tess J. Moon Decision makers often present military researchers with a most daunting challenge: to pursue, with some level of prophetic certainty, innovative concepts that will yield increased capabilities during future wars against forecasted threats in not-yet- determined locations. This conundrum is complicated further with the requirement that the proposed technology yield benefit throughout the various strata of military operations. In the maturation of an advanced capability enabled by a technological advancement, a groundbreaking design should simultaneously demonstrate performance overmatch against an envisioned foe while showing that the costs associated with development, procurement, and operation outweigh reverting to an incremental advancement in the conventional means of delivering combat power. vii This manuscript focuses on the construction and utilization of decision support tools for use by scientists and engineers charged with providing a quantitative evaluation of an advanced ground combat system. The concepts presented focus on the effects and synergy regarding the combat vehicle principal attributes of survivability, lethality, and mobility. Additionally, this study provides a framework for analysis of these attributes when screened at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. These concepts are presented and demonstrated from both the candidate selection (or choice) perspective, and the concept development (or design) perspective. As an example of this approach, this study includes a comparison of conventional powder gun cannonry versus a specific type of electromagnetic launch device known as the railgun. The decision support tools formulated in this dissertation allow the user to distill, at a coarse level of fidelity, the parametric relationships between system survivability, lethality, and mobility for advanced weapon system concepts. The proposed methods are suited for evaluation at the nascent stages of development, when the information normally applied in standard methods is sparse. This general approach may also be valuable in contemporary acquisition strategies employed in urgent fielding efforts, where the immediacy of the problem can benefit from an expedient and efficient method of analyzing the coupled and synergistic effects of implementing a proposed technology. While advantage is typically measured in terms of performance overmatch at the platform level, the broadening of this consideration vertically to higher levels of military command can aid in identifying the competing issues and complementary relationships related to a technical approach. Finally, given the backdrop demonstration for the framework, this manuscript may serve as a brief summary of system fundamentals and design theory for direct fire powder gun cannonry and electromagnetic railguns. viii Table of Contents List of Tables ....................................................................................................... xiv List of Figures...................................................................................................... xvi List of Appendices ............................................................................................. xxiv List of Abbreviations ...........................................................................................xxv Chapter 1: Introduction...........................................................................................1 1.1 Overview................................................................................................1 1.2 Background............................................................................................2 1.2.1 Generational Warfare Construct ...................................................6 1.2.2 Puzzles and Mysteries...................................................................9 1.3 Motivation............................................................................................13 1.4 Research Objectives.............................................................................21 1.4 Literature Review.................................................................................26 1.4.1 Multicriteria Decision Making Analysis.....................................28 1.4.2 Ground Combat Vehicle Theory and Design..............................33 1.4.3 Ongoing Complementary