Toward Robust Battle Experimental Design for Command and Control of Mechanized Infantry Brigade

Abstract

During a military operation, the nature of command and control (C2) depends primarily on the intuition of a human commander. If the quality and timing of decision making leads to decisions, good commanders should be able to distinguish between decisions that require urgent responses and those to which responses can be delayed. However, current Republic of Korea military doctrine emphasizes only the speed of decision making and operations, regardless of command type. Hence, we investigate the design parameters for command timing such as decision-making time and ordering/reporting cycle during the offensive operation of a mechanized infantry brigade. We build a simulation model of the brigade's operations that comprises detailed C2 process models. Next, we use the Taguchi method to identify command timing that both optimizes performance and is robust to combat-related noise factors. The results demonstrate that rapid command times do not always correlate with high combat effectiveness. The results are also compared with those using the Latin hypercube design, which also support the insight we found using the Taguchi method although the Taguchi method was better at finding optimal parameter setting in this case. The findings of simulation-based virtual experiments and optimization processes offer guidelines for the detailed design of C2 activities.