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GMU C4I Center Seminar

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Cognitive Amplification for Military Battle Staff Planning

Jerry Schlabach
Research Assistant Professor, C4I Center

Friday, December 7, 2007

ABSTRACT

Military Battles are often won or lost based upon which side first reaches "key terrain."" And yet, using widely-accepted guidelines, 56 percent of a Brigade's battle-preparation time is consumed by Brigade and Battalion staff planning, before Company Commanders even receive the mission and start their own planning. Hence, any reduction in the amount of time a staff requires for planning will result in a marked battlefield advantage, since the unit will be faster.

This seminar will demonstrate a pre-beta version of the Battlefield Terrain Reasoning Awareness (BTRA) Battle Engine, or BBE. This prototype cognitively amplifies the ability of human staff planners to conduct Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) and the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). More precisely, the human-computer reasoning team will develop and analyze tactical "Courses of Action" (COA's) much faster and better than humans alone.

BBE accomplishes this by using a terrain-informed, fast-abstract Agent Based System (ABS) to conduct a doctrinal wargaming analysis of a battle situation. The system also uses a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to recommend solutions which appear to best satisfy the "Desired End-State,"" an important component of the "Commander's Intent." Since the battlefield is a chaotic system, the ABS and the GA work together to identify and exploit emergent military tactics. From a domain perspective, BBE reasons within "METT-T" (Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops, and Time) situational context.

This seminar will also present the conceptual basis for extending this research to fundamentally address the problem of "Information Overload" in modern command posts. The future research will accomplish this through cognitively amplified intelligence analysis of battlefield reports, using a probabilistic evidential reasoning system, such as a Bayesian Belief Network.

BIO

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Jerry Schlabach served 22 years in the U.S. Army in Military Intelligence and the Signal Corps. As an expert in tactical operations and intelligence he co-authored several Army Field Manuals (FM's), to include the current FM 34-130, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (1994), the current FM 34-2, Collection Management and Synchronization Planning (1994), and the original FM 34-8, Combat Commander's Handbook on Intelligence (1992). In 1984 he graduated from the United States Military Academy with a BS in Physics, and he acquired an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. He is a member of the George Mason University Faculty, and is currently working a two-year assignment for the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) through an Inter-Governmental Personnel Agreement.