We now recognize the importance of formal planning for transition of responsibility from military to civilian sides of the government and international organizations. Representing this is an entirely new requirement for modeling and simulation tools. We’re adapting civilian urban planning tools and hospital care tools into our standard suite of defense modeling. As we do this, we’re also observing that these tools should be used for our everyday business practices in garrison, training, and providing for our troops. That’s exciting because the defense enterprise is probably the only place that represents total integration of interests in a single operating system. Our defense establishments run bases and installations, housing, feed and clothe the troops, operate hospitals and airports–all in one dynamic system. No civilian corporation or firm can have the same span of regard. So we are going to be taking the very best that the civilian world has invented, and making it work together for even greater effectiveness and efficiency.

The second area of massive change is the exponential increase in technology available on the battlefield not to special James Bond operators, but to everyone. We are experiencing simply stunning changes in the way we’ve employed technology in the last five years. In the Air Defense Artillery (ADA) world, for example, we’ve gone from defending against enemy aircraft and missiles to the capability to provide active defenses to shoot down individual mortar, rocket and artillery rounds. That’s simply amazing. Army platoons now routinely employ robots to check tunnels, caves, and bunkers. Army companies are now receiving their own independent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to let them get situational awareness of the area. Many of our units have been provided with handheld devices to downlink live video feed from circling aircraft and UAVs, overlaying this on top of their tactical maps and synchronized with the reported locations of all friendly units over the satellite reporting system we call Blue Force Tracking. For the US Army, the representation of these systems into our models is required “catch-up” work. The pace of operations has moved advanced concepts into our units faster than we’ve represented them in either our combat models or our integrated training devices. This situation is not expected to change, so our challenge is to increase the pace of our response in modeling and simulation to match and get ahead of the speed of technology development. Indeed, the expected growth curve of technology is expected to become steeper very quickly. The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program has developed unique advanced technologies which are beginning to form up on the plains of Ft Bliss, Texas into a new unit made just to examine how radical advances act and interact with each other. These include new UAVs, unmanned ground systems and robots, sensors, and totally integrated command and control suites. We’ll continue to spin these out into our current force as rapidly as possible, because we are seeing that they have the real potential to bring value added to our current operations.

The last, and most forceful, area of change concerns expectations. Economists and

social scientists will advise you that there is little impetus for societal change in societies that are insulated from knowing that something better is available. However, when there is widespread appreciation that something better can exist, then a problem of “rising expectations” occurs: citizens expect better faster than it can be provided, and are upset when they don’t see the potential for better happening fast enough for them. Most of today’s general officers entered the Army when sand tables or models were the limits of expectation, and yellow stickys or magic marker on a map expressed commanders’ intent. We more senior officers, who don’t play current videogames and don’t typically use all the newest possible features of our cell phones, can be easily impressed with today’s evolution of command capability. However, today’s operator for the man-machine interfaces has grown up their whole life with computers, even in grade school, and came into the Army sharing files across their phones. [When I came into the Army a mark of importance was that you had a phone.] This new generation simply knows how much can be done today with models and simulations, expects that their Army (and it is becoming THEIR Army) knows it, and expects to have it because of the advantages they absolutely know will be empowered by this new M&S. They expect management tools equivalent to or better than how they manage their personal banking, and training tools equivalent to or better than the games they have played on console gaming machines all the years they were in school. This is a powerful focus, because these expectations form a social contract. We teach them to love their service, tell them that we are the strongest Army in the world, and therefore they expect us to be the best at what we do—how we train them, the tools we give them to operate, the M&S we use to make decisions between alternatives.

Between these three areas of change, getting M&S right is both more important and more challenging than ever before. Now, what are the challenges to us in moving forward with this charge? I would claim that there are at least two big issues that we need to get past, convoluted processes and working in teams.

Convoluted processes are just simply not agile enough to work in the modern environment. We cannot afford to become extinct like these Neanderthals, but long-embedded processes developed so as to take no risk are not responsive to the pace of technology, operations, or expectations. Soldiers today cycle through a generation of cell phones in the time it takes us to get budget consensus through the formal acquisition process. Any gaming

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