Risk Assessment War-game (RAW)

During Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) Course of Action Analysis (COAA), the commander and staff rely on interactive-active role-playing, Simulated Interactions (SI), to analyze each prospective Friendly Course of Action (FCOA). In an effort to predict whether an FCOA will meet the goals and objectives at a critical event, the “blue” team and the “red” team act out the exchanges between the “friendly” and threat forces, respectively. Although the stated purpose of the doctrinal war-game is to determine which “COA" accomplishes the mission with minimum casualties while best positioning the force to retain the initiative for future operations” (U. S. Army 1997), the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) was unable to find records of any formal study assessing the effectiveness of the doctrinal war-game. (CALL 2003)

In the doctrinal COAA war-game, the friendly actions are fixed and all the uncertainty is associated with the threat reactions. However, the war-game does not capture the uncertainty in these threat reactions. A recent Army Research Laboratory (ARL) study identified this failure to account for the uncertainty in the threat’s reactions as a significant weakness of the MDMP. (Kaste, Bodt et al. 2000)

In this paper, we present our methodology for using SI to quantitatively assess risk during COAA. We will show that the Risk Assessment War-game (RAW) provides the theoretical framework for a thorough, quantitative risk assessment whereas the doctrinal war-game does not. We will demonstrate how the commander and staff can use the quantitative risk assessment for risk management within each alternative and for selecting a Pareto optimal COA based upon the commander’s degree of risk aversion.