Real-time Simulation Supporting Effects-Based Planning 2008

In recent years the concept of EBAO - Effects-Based Approach to Operations - has become a central theme in the military-strategic debate. A key reason for this has been that prevailing doctrines and methods of command and control have been less than perfectly adapted to contemporary needs, in particular as they manifest themselves during execution of international crisis management operations. In this report we describe the first year´s activity of a project that develops decision support and simulation techniques to facilitate Effects-Based Planning (EBP). Using a decision support tool a decision maker is to be able to test a number of feasible plans against possible courses of events and decide which of these plans that are capable to achieve the desired end state and at what cost. Also, there is a need of being able to evaluate a plan before its execution as well as to perform replanning as the need arises. The purpose is to evaluate the plan, among other things to detect its weaknesses, and also to be able to understand its further consequences. An important precondition for a successful plan preparation is to find suitable indicators which can distinguish between groups of plans with different consequences. Against these indicators intelligence queries may be formulated. The project has also developed version 2.0 of CSMT, an operations analytical tool to facilitate the analysis of plans using morphological analysis.