OMEGA Int. J. of Mgmt Sci., Vol. 13. No, 2. pp. $3-88. 1985 0305-0483,85 S3.00-,-0.00 Pnnted in Great Britain. All ra~Aats reserved Copyrtght ~ [985 Pergamon Press L~d

EDITORIAL Aiding the Management of Defence

W H E N [ WAS invited, as guest editor, to seek contributions for an issue devoted to management science and operational research (OR) in defence, it seemed desirable to have a theme. This would provide some coherence of material and would narrow the search for authors. My thoughts turned to what the challenges of this very difficult area of study were, and what these challenges were doing, in different countries, to encourage new methods and new approaches.

I had in mind two main issues of wider interest. Firstly, in what ways was co-operation between analysts and clients developing; secondly, what new techniques were being developed or used to deal with the wider environment in which defence organisation and defence spending needed to be examined. I was also interested in the pressures which might be making support for defence decisions more difficult to provide than it was in earlier decades, and whether these pressures also were leading to innovation.

One such pressure is that the context of defence is becoming, or perhaps is being recognised as being, more political. This is both in the sense of military activity as an extension of the political and diplomatic arms, and in the sense that military spending competes with civil spending in difficult economic circumstances. Budget constraints also limit the availablity of resources for analysis at a time when decision support is even more necessary. Whether such limitation is economically sound is debatable, yet it seems to me that it exists, There are too few analysts; too little scope for adequate training and retraining over the fields of expertise needed; too little effort on research and too little money for facilities for improved data handling and for communication in its myriad aspects.

Perhaps it has always been so; wisdom, money and time are always in short supply when judged against what we aspire to. However, my thesis was that, at this moment in time, changes were likely to be taking place to cope with necessary economies of scale and with expanding frameworks for study. It also seemed likely that, despite the superficial differences in military systems (based on the difficulty of testing, in peacetime, whether the systems would operate satisfactorily in wartime), and despite the restrictions on open

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discussion of details of organisation and performance, defence studies could be a source of ideas that would be relevant to many civil management tasks.

I take the view that the study of defence, particularly the management of defence, has characteristics which make it not dissimilar to the study of other large-scale socio-economic systems, in government and in industry. If this is even partly correct, methodology should be transferable, or at the very least, the philosophy underlying the methodology should have relevance. Techniques used to put methodology into practice might also have generic properties, although exposing techniques could be difficult.

Description of a technique, if it is to be seen as a contribution to operational research or management science, requires also a clear appreciation of the problem of which it was a chosen tool and the results that it achieved. This is often hard enough due to constraints of commercial or political confidence, and much harder when national security interests are involved. In principle, such difficulties can be overcome; in practice, concern , bou t what might be given away by accident, and the time and effort required to rewrite papers for a different purpose and a different audience, means that suitable material is not often available for publication.

THE QUEST

My request to individuals, in senior positions in the defence organisations of their countries, contained the following statements about the sort of paper I sought from them or from others whom they might name.

" . . . First and foremost, I want papers which discuss the types of p r o b l e m . . , which require new approaches . . . . It is desirable that such papers be of interest to industry and to academics, as well as to other defence analysts. Topics that clearly have wide appeal are those that deal, for example, with studies of organisation, planning of research and development, financial planning, management in a changing environ- ment, and with crisis management. There are many others.

Additionally, I want to include some accounts of studies which have been successful in the sense of being accepted by and implemented by the customers. Here, it is more the process by which the study has been done and the way communication with the customers has been carried out that would be of interest, although the techniques used are also important. Particularly, I would welcome papers which indicated how the less measurable factors have been integrated with those that are conventionally measurable . . 2"

I also forwarded a paper which had been presented for discussion at a conference in May, 1980 [2], and which expanded my theme.

Not unexpectedly, some found it difficult to respond positively to my request, for reasons already indicated. Those who did respond, and whose contributions are printed in this issue, met my criteria as best they could. It may help the reader to have a summary of what I see as the special value of these contributions. I add, below, what I can from my own knowledge, in support or extension of their messages.

Omega, Vol. 13. No. 2 85

THE PAPERS

The first paper, by David Daniel, reflects on the task of operational research at Command level. Working closely with the operational service staff, his emphases are on communication and on close inquiry into the nature of the problem: the need, if there is to be effective use of analysis, is to get, and to keep, the confidence and willingness to listen of the top level of the Command structure. I was recently involved as an adviser on gaming at Strike Command Headquarters. I was impressed by the skill with which I and others were briefed on the guidance needed on the roles of games--for teaching; for learning and questioning; and for research into issues of command and control. I observed also the easy acceptance by the operational staff of dialogue on the need for better understanding of their most complex task. Mathematical models do have their place in the work done for the Command, but they are regarded merely as tools to facilitate analysis of aspects of the overall problem. The paper, as printed here, is a variant of an internal paper: the interest shown in two of Professor Eilon's Omega editorials and in my views on ethical issues, also published in Omega, is purely coincidental!

The second paper is a lengthy one, but it covers the views of a number of nations in the NATO alliance, primarily those of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany. Reiner Huber has summarised and commented on the findings of a 1982 symposium concerned with defence planning: the emphasis is on non-attrition processes, command and control and combat service support being the burning issues. There should be a relevance beyond that to defence in his comment on model hierarchies and nesting.

Huber comments on Daniel's work on Army games (an early report on which was published in Omega [5]) and on the work of Klein and Cooper (his reference [I 1]), both of which relate to the search for a better understanding of how commanders look at their tasks and how they process data for their key decisions. He says of Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I):

"'Not much is known about the performance of higher order cognitive functions and the population of decision makers who implement tactics and doctrine and respond to intelligence and ECM."

I would have liked to have been able to report on work being done on C3I for the Ministry of Defence (Navy), UK, by research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Surrey and London (LSE & PS and RHC): unfortunately it is too early for definitive statements of progress. However, an early report on progress and intent of the Royal Holloway College work was presented at the EURO VI Congress at Vienna [4]. This was particularly concerned with studies to understand the expertise of and the ways of aiding senior commanders.

86 Editorial

As a final comment on Huber's most informative report, I would recommend those who wish to follow up his advice on the relevance of cognitive mapping to consult Eden, Jones and Sims [6].

The third paper, by George Lindsey, covers the general philosophy of Canadian defence. New demands, over the last 15 years have called for much broader experience from the teams of analysts employed. Important areas are logistics; manpower; peacekeeping; economic stud- ies and sociological studies. This last is an area of concern that only Canadian OR seems to have entered: reference is made to work on the effects of social change, on the military family and on community relations, as well as to more conventional subjects such as morale and motivation. However, classical OR has continued at only a slightly lower intensity, and now shows signs of becoming more in demand. The picture presented is of particular interest because defence is looked at as an element of the total economic and social pattern, and not as an isolated function to be analysed in isolation.

Dr Srivastava provides a short history of the development of OR for Indian Defence. He deals with a number of special problems such as transportation and communications in the difficult northern terrain, and he also stresses the importance of logistics, maintenance and reliability. He speaks of the failure to achieve adequate communication between the largely mathematically-oriented OR staff and the military users. Other shortcomings are the lack of a problem-formulation methodology--or at least a failure to teach i t - -and the way in which defence decisions and expenditures are not integrated with national planning: this has taken resources away from sorely needed social measures, as may well be the case in many developing countries. I was struck by the fact that his message is much less encouraging than that of an extensive coverage of Indian Defence OR [7] which I reviewed for another journal [3].

Per Agrell deals with the methodology of OR at the National Defence Research Institute of Sweden (FOA). This is, in effect, an updating chapter to the 1977 book, Trends in Planning (his reference [6]). Despite its relatively small analytical resources, FOA offers some refreshing and challenging differences in its approaches. It co-operates with, and works for, departments other than defence: it reflects deeply on the methods and processes that it uses: it values its academic associations, yet it works pragmatically and offers more than an analytic model-building expertise. Above all, it tries to work at the frontiers of its broadly-defined subject and draws in whatever and whoever might be useful. It is no accident that the nine references to the paper are drawn from five different nations.

The next paper is of a more technical nature. Tony Lewins and Katherine Pakenham describe an important statistical model devel- opment: it provides an operationally meaningful measure of supply per- formance in maintaining aircraft availability. It is one example among many of the importance of combat service support that was stressed by

Omega. Vol. 13, No. 2 87

Huber in the second paper. The model can be transparent to the user, in the sense of the variables involved and how they are treated, despite the fact that the probabilistic and combinatorial processes are complicated and the calculations require computer support. There is a further value in its wide applicability, in principle, to the repair and support problems, of, for example, weapon systems,

Finally, because the name of Lanchester is so well-known in the mod- elling of battle attrition, I thought that readers should be informed of the work of the UK Lanchester Study Group. Lanchester-type models, par- ticularly stochastic models, can still offer a lot to defence studies. The group is an informal banding-together of enthusiasts--academics, de- fence workers and former defence workers. Perhaps its most useful poten- tial service to those outside the group is the availability of over 600 references to the literature of Lanchester modelling. Fergus Daly reports for the group on the discussions held to date.

LOOKING BACK

I would not claim that what I have put together is what, ideally, I would have wished. I sought, unsuccessfully, for papers which would have outlined the views of central analysis organisations in the UK, in the USA (despite publicity in Phalanx, the ORSA/MORS journal), in France, and in Israel. I also narrowly failed to get an interesting account of a meth- odology for R&D programme planning. I would have liked more ex- posure of the problems met in moving, or trying to move, into new areas (e.g. political aspects) or in using new expertises (e.g. psychology). How- ever, I am most grateful for the co-operation of the authors represented here, for their patience and for their most professional offerings.

It has frequently been observed that defence analysis is too closed off from the general reader. I hope that this issue does something to redress the balance; that it will encourage more defence workers to offer their ideas for publication and encourage those in non-defence management support to realise that some of their problems may well be paralleled in the defence world. They may even have been 'solved'.

Methodology and techniques can often be passed on without re- striction. Many of the ideas that have been generated during defence studies are still unpublished, The reader of this issue can perhaps use the names and addresses at the end of each paper as a starting point for inquiry. Such a random search process may well have useful properties.

Royal Holloway College University of London UK

KEN BOWEN Guest Editor

88 Editorial

R E F E R E N C E S

1. Banerjee UK (1980) Operational Analysis and lndian Defence. Concept. New Delhi. 2. Bowen KC (1980) Operational research's contribution to the problems of defence. Third

International Discussion Conference on Operational Research, Universities of Sussex, Lancaster and Pennsylvania. Hove, May 1980. Appendix B to Bowen KC, A methodology for problem formulation. PhD thesis, University of London. 1984.

3, Bowen KC (1981) Review of reference 1 above. Eur. J, opl Res 7(4), 404-405. 4. Bowen KC and Moynihan P (1983) Current research on aiding human judgement in high level

strategic decision processes. A paper presented at the Sixth European Congress on Operational Research. Vienna, Austria, July 1983.

5. Daniel DW (1979) What influences a decision? Some results from a highly controlled defence game. Omega 8(4), 409--419.

6. Eden C, Jones S and Sims D (1983) Messing abo,~t in Problems: an Informal Structured Approach to their Identification and Management. Pergamon Press, Oxford,