More than 2,000 years ago, Sun Tsu, a philosopher of war, discussed the importance of forward planning in battle. "The rules of the military are five: measurement, assessment, calculation, comparison and victory. The ground gives rise to measurements, measurements give rise to assessments, assessments give rise to calculations, calculations give rise to comparisons, comparisons give rise to victories," he wrote in The Art of War.
For Sun Tsu, difficult problems required strategic solutions, and it is fair to say the principle still applies. His five rules set a template for military planning, laying the groundwork for modern technologies such as modelling and simulation (M&S).
Of course, today’s M&S technologies are some way removed from the measuring and assessing of ancient China. In the past few decades, they have evolved at breakneck speed, greatly enhancing the defence sector in the process. We only need think of immersive training, which is a key development priority across NATO. Widely pegged as the way forward for military education, packages such as Virtual Battlespace (VBS) have become extremely common, allowing individuals to engage in realistic, interactive simulations. According to Bohemia Interactive Simulations, which produces the game, more than 19 NATO nations and nine partner nations, as well as three NATO entities, use VBS products in their simulation centres.
Incorporating technology
The question, then, is how rapidly evolving technologies of this kind can be incorporated into an ever-changing security environment. Considering how fast the field is developing, it is evident that M&S technology requires some careful oversight. How can we ensure its potential is being harnessed, and that it will continue to be in the years ahead?
Francisco Gomez-Ramos, head of the NATO M&S Coordination Office, is clear about what a well-planned and implemented M&S capability infrastructure can achieve. "It will help NATO and national forces to optimise their training programmes, as well as maintain their operational levels with reduced involvement of real systems and, in many cases, personnel," he says. "This means there will be lower operational expenses and almost zero impact on the natural environment. But, most importantly, M&S can save lives."
The M&S Coordination Office is the executive body of the M&S Group (NMSG). Together they form part of NATO’s Science and Technology Organisation (STO). NMSG supervises the implementation of the NATO M&S Master Plan, proposing updates as and when they are needed.
"We have a twofold task," says Gomez-Ramos. "One is to provide support to the NMSG in the development and monitoring of activities; the other is to provide technical advice in M&S matters to the NATO chief scientist and other STO principals."
The first master plan was signed in 1998, at a time when M&S technologies were generally expensive and uncoordinated. Back then, the main issue was a lack of interoperability – most applications were developed by individual organisations to meet the needs of a particular group of users and could not be used in concert.
NATO therefore set out a framework document detailing how M&S activities might be used to reach its global strategic vision. It laid out the actions that could be taken to meet its needs and objectives, and identified the governance mechanisms that would be necessary to get there.
While this master plan yielded some achievements, with time it lost relevance. NATO had been restructured, with new participants introduced and existing parties given new roles. Meanwhile, its strategic and operational setting had become more complex, meaning it was no longer sufficient simply to focus on the kinetic effects of warfare; multiple futures, human behaviour, asymmetric threats, information superiority and high readiness forces were all important aspects too.
Perhaps most notably, there had been significant technical advances, including the increased use of M&S solutions derived from non-defence sectors and the growing maturity of M&S technologies for training, acquisition and support. NATO therefore published an updated framework in 2012 – the M&S Master Plan 2.0.
"In general, we can say the M&S domain has highly reinforced its role and potential expectations in support of the alliance, and particularly in support of NATO forces operations," says Gomez-Ramos. "These days, nobody has to be convinced about the crucial support it offers. In version 2.0, the main objectives remain the same, but their application as a training and engineering tool has gained further importance. Applications in support of mission planning have become a realistic option, and as PC hardware has become cheaper and more capable, it has supported the development and use of M&S," continues Gomez-Ramos.
Today, as NATO works to implement the new framework, M&S technologies are becoming ever-more entrenched across the defence sector. Its three main application areas – support to operations, capability development and procurement – are each broad enough to cover a full spectrum of different tasks.
"Support to operations includes education, training and exercising, operational planning, operational rehearsal, and analysis and decision-making support," says Gomez-Ramos. "Capability development means fostering continuous improvement of military capabilities to enhance the interoperability and effectiveness of NATO and nations, and helping to detect interoperability gaps before implementation in actual operations.
"Procurement means supporting the complete life-cycle management of assets and systems, including design risk reduction, test and evaluation. It can also facilitate appropriate allocation of resources and optimal management," says Gomez-Ramos.
He sees a broad movement away from individual simulation platforms and towards more complex distributed systems that facilitate collective training or mission preparation. This means that, where training was once strategic and abstract, today it is practical and mission-focused.
Cost-effective, complex training
The advantages here are clear: M&S assets help to deliver cost-effective training while offering a high degree of complexity, as well as control over weather conditions and threats. Although simulation systems are not cheap, they are mostly cheaper than training with live systems, and they are certainly far less dangerous. The impact on the natural environment, meanwhile, is negligible.
"We must keep in mind that forces that operate together need to train and exercise together, and the current context requires additional training that is also cleaner, safer and cheaper," says Gomez-Ramos. "In my opinion, this is one of the more attractive aspects of the expected future increase in the use of M&S assets in NATO."
M&S assets are also being used to support capability development processes, studying how emerging technologies and new concepts may affect the battlefield. "They can be very useful in the NATO Forces Transformation Process led by the Allied Command Transformation (ACT)," explains Gomez-Ramos. "We will certainly see an increased use of simulation in the next concept development and experimentation (CD&E), and multinational experiment (MNE) exercises. And we cannot forget the specific case of cyberdefence. Here, it is almost imperative to design and exercise in virtual environments, avoiding prejudicial impact over actual networks.
"M&S technology also has to be an essential driver in the development of the NATO Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) through two of its three pillars: better use of technology, and better training and exercising. It provides an important contribution in the foundation of these two pillars."
For the most part, the technologies themselves are relatively mature. Today’s challenges are less to do with technical issues and more to do with adapting commercial off-the-shelf products (such as war games) to meet military objectives and requirements. Another stumbling block is IT based – in today’s world, M&S services may need to be provided across multiple platforms such as smartphones and tablets, and for that they need to be uploaded to the cloud.
The real question, however, is to what extent can the nations work together to achieve their shared goals?
"The future will not only be shaped by technological advances, or the merging of new technologies – it also depends on the level of political consensus," points out Gomez-Ramos. "Obviously, this is no different to other aspects of NATO – we are forced to reach a consensus in all areas, and it’s the decision of the nations that will define what our level of ambition has to be."
For the time being, the MSG (aided by the Coordination Office) will continue to focus on its core job: discovering and defining which military needs might best be fulfilled by M&S. It will keep a lookout for any gaps in interoperability by developing and implementing tools, and seeking better ways to provide M&S services within the NATO framework.
The possibilities, however, speak for themselves. As the technology continues to advance, simulations are becoming increasingly realistic, leaving less to the imagination and more to what’s on the screen. In Gomez-Ramos’s mind, the potential for M&S systems is only just beginning to explode.
"Honestly, I think the technology will help us all to reach our ambitions and discover the potentialities of M&S systems in helping NATO forces to reach their objectives," he says.
