Introduction
1. INTRODUCTION
Leaders in large organizations often face tough policy decisions involving
complex systems and considerable uncertainty. They must consider how a wide
range of options contribute to conflicting objectives in a variety of situations, and
then rely on a mixture of intuition and expert advice to make their final choice.
This dissertation introduces a new type of decision support process that can
assist decision makers when they are in this sort of predicament. This hybrid,
interactive, multiple-attribute, exploratory (HIMAX) approach is a substantial
improvement over traditional decision-support methods because it incorporates
complexity and uncertainty, and explores the implications of minority opinions
among expert advisors, providing insights that other methods might miss. To
demonstrate this new approach and illustrate its capabilities, this dissertation
presents an analysis of future force options using the HIMAX process. This
analysis yields useful insights and provocative observations regarding the
dilemma confronting the U.S. Army today, indicating that the HIMAX process
could be used to inform high-level policy choices in other contexts as well.
1.1 THE ARMY’S DILEMMA
As it stands at the dawn of 21st Century, the U.S. Army faces a turbulent
and daunting future. If the trends of the 1990s continue, the early decades of the
next century will be characterized by both strategic uncertainty and regional
instability. While a great power on a par with the U.S. is unlikely to emerge in
this time frame, regional powers, rogue states, and even transnational
organizations may threaten U.S. interests around the world in a variety of ways,
with very little warning. Thus, the greatest challenges facing the Army will stem
from the frequency, diversity, novelty and complexity—rather than the intensity
—of future conflicts. To be both effective and efficient (and relevant) in this type
of future the Army must be able to respond quickly and decisively to a wide
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range of contingencies, and then achieve a swift victory with few casualties and
minimal logistic support. While engaged in such a conflict, the Army must also
fulfill its existing commitments around the world, and remain ready to respond
to other similar incidents.
The Army of today, with its Cold-War heritage, is not well-suited for such a
dynamic and unstable security environment. Its armored divisions are very
heavy and require extensive support, so they are extremely costly and slow to
deploy, especially in areas with no existing infrastructure. The Army’s lighter
forces—the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions—can be deployed much
more rapidly and require considerably less support, but they do not have enough
mobility, protection and firepower to be effective on their own; if overmatched
they could be ineffective and sustain high casualties. The Army may be able to
serve U.S. interests more effectively in the emerging environment if it can bridge
the gap in its current mix of capabilities with a balanced “medium-weight” force;
a new type of force that is more deployable and sustainable than heavy armored
units, yet more mobile, potent and survivable than light infantry forces (Gordon
and Wilson, 1998, 1999). Indeed, the Army adopted a new vision in 1999 that
dedicates it to moving in the direction of medium-weight forces (Shinseki, 1999).
The dilemma, of course, lies in the details of this transformation; a force that is
more deployable and sustainable will tend to be weaker and more vulnerable.
Tradeoffs like this need to be evaluated to determine whether new mediumweight forces can deliver the benefits that they are intended to provide.
1.2 MOTIVATION FOR A NEW APPROACH
This sort of predicament is not unique to the Army. Overtaken by external
events, large organizations sometimes find themselves with a base of human,
social and physical capital that is inappropriate for their new circumstances. In
this moment of truth, the organization’s leaders can make better decisions if they
have a coherent way of merging input from a diverse group of expert advisors to
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evaluate and compare, refine or expand, and then reassess their options. If,
however, the systems involved are complex, and the context is highly uncertain,
simply aggregating expert evaluations of the alternatives may neglect important
synergies and sensitivities, and thus produce misleading results. In this sort of
environment, a decision support process is most effective if it can combine five
important capabilities: capturing synergistic interactions, reconciling conflicting
objectives, comparing diverse options across multiple missions, representing
uncertainty explicitly, and exploring implications of divergent minority opinions.
Conventional approaches to the analysis of strategic decision making,
especially those involving military forces, tend to be weak in one or more of
these important capabilities, while the HIMAX process, which this dissertation
describes and demonstrates, incorporates features that address all five of them.
A customized evaluation model at the core of the HIMAX process combines
multiple option attributes, which are each linked to a key strategic objective. The
detailed structure of this model is designed to capture synergies within each
option by deriving its attributes from the characteristics of its components, using
expert input to determine the relevant parameters. After seeing a summary of the
preliminary results, the experts can refine their initial assessments and suggest
new or modified options. The parallel nature of the model1 allows several
options to be evaluated simultaneously for a select set of situations. Uncertainty
in technological performance is represented explicitly, and propagated through
the model, providing confidence intervals on the outcomes for each option. The
effects of perturbations in the model’s parameters are systematically explored to
highlight the potential impact of expert assessment errors. Most importantly,
minority opinions among the experts are used to guide and focus exploration,
rather than ignoring them and relying exclusively on the group consensus. The
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1
The customized version of the HIMAX process used in this analysis is implemented with
Analytica™, a visual modeling tool developed by Lumina Decision Systems.
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Introduction
insights gained from this type of informed exploration can then be used to slant
and color how the final results of the analysis are interpreted.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE ANALYSIS
This dissertation describes the HIMAX process in detail, and then applies it
to an analysis of future force options. The objective of this analysis is two-fold.
First, it aims to provide insights and observations regarding policy choices facing
the Army today. Second, and more importantly, it intends to demonstrate that
the HIMAX process is an effective way to support high-level policy decisions,
and could be applied to inform equally challenging choices in other areas.
The analysis compares five force options—heavy armored, mediumweight, light infantry, air-only standoff, and special operations teams with
standoff—in two time frames: the near term (2005–2010) and the far term
(2015–2025). The near-term options are more evolutionary in nature, as
compared to today’s forces, while the far-term options include some more
revolutionary capabilities that would require significant technological
breakthroughs. The HIMAX evaluation model was, of course, customized to
assess and compare such a diverse set of military force options, and eight people,
drawn from the RAND research staff and visiting military fellows, served as
experts by providing the input needed to determine the model parameters.
By generating genuine insights into the decisions facing the Army in the
early part of the 21st Century, and then providing policy observations based on
these insights, this research makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing
policy debate on the transformation of the Army, and provides a framework for
further analysis. The customized evaluation model developed for this analysis is
also appropriate for other similarly complex defense planning problems. With
some modifications, the HIMAX process could be applied to high-level decisions
in a variety of contexts, especially those that are highly uncertain and involve
complex systems, like infrastructure protection or space exploration.
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1.4 ORGANIZATION OF THE DISSERTATION
The dissertation includes a total of twelve chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the
motivation for a new high-level decision-support methodology, and how the
HIMAX process is designed to address it. Chapter 3 presents the methodology
of the HIMAX process in detail. Chapter 4 describes how the evaluation model
was customized to assess and compare military force options. Chapter 5
discusses the structure of the analysis conducted to demonstrate this process,
and provides details on the composition of the options under consideration.
Chapters 6 through 10 present and discuss the results of the first five phases in
the HIMAX process: preparation, generation, evaluation, prioritization and
exploration. No chapter is devoted to the sixth and final phase, interaction, since
this phase was not included in the analysis. Chapter 11 serves a similar function,
however, re-analyzing the HIMAX results from a prescriptive perspective, and
drawing out insights to provide a basis for several observations regarding the
policy choices facing the Army. Chapter 12 wraps up the dissertation with a
review of the advantages and limitations of the HIMAX process, in light of its
performance in the analysis, a discussion of several possible improvements, and
descriptions of a few ideas for future applications.
The dissertation also includes two appendices. Appendix A describes the
assumptions made about opposing forces in order to determine the floor of the
effectiveness scale used in the evaluation model. Appendix B provides some
background information on the people who participated as experts in the
demonstration analysis.
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