HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE OF THE IABG WAR GAMING CENTRE
In:
Military Strategy and Tactics, Ed: R.K. Huber, L.F. Jones, F. Reine, S. 337 ff, Plenum Press, New York, 1975
The decision maker's requirement as to the services rendered to him by systems analysis may be boiled down to three fundamental ones:
· The analysis must encompass the entire decision space, which means that essentially all options open to the decision maker are to be covered by the analysis.
· The analytical tools being applied must be sufficiently realistic in the sense that models do correlate adequately to the real world behaviour.
· The analysis must respond to the time constraints of the decision maker.
Disregarding for a moment the width of the decision space or the number of options, the latter two requirements alone are inherently conflicting. The development and employment of models with a low degree of abstraction or rather high degree of realism often result in analysis response time too long to satisfy the decision maker's time requirements. Models with a high degree of abstraction tend to get away from reality; however, their simplicity does most always assure that results can be produced rather quickly. The very difficulty is to find an acceptable compromise, one which provides the decision maker sufficiently realistic quantitative evidence in time to support his decision process. The number of options open to the decision maker, which has to be included in the analysis, is adding to this dilemma. Experience indicates that such a compromise cannot be provided by any single model, but only by a family of models which are applied iteratively, an approach which permits to gradually narrow down the options of the decision maker while simultaneously increasing the depth of the analysis. This philosophy is at the heart of the IABG War Gaming Systems which resemble a family of essentially three interrelated gaming models:
· COFORKS (FORKS): a research land war game on brigade level with control levels down to platoons;
· KORA: a computer assisted integrated ground/air war game on corps level with control levels down to battalion/company/platoon and operational air unit;
· RELACS (OPS): a computer assisted integrated ground/air war game on central front level with control levels down to divisions/brigades and operational air unit.