| Military Worth Analysis of New Concept Weapons |
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| Apr 01 2006 | |
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Page 2 of 4
Advertisement: AFRL created the Concept Impact Team (CIT) to conduct MWA for new munitions concepts and related weapons technologies. The first challenge for the CIT was to conduct campaignlevel MWA for Dominator, an AFRLdeveloped cooperative weapon concept designed to loiter for long periods over a target area, fly in constellations, and deploy multiple submunitions against mobile targets.1 Dominator’s autonomous and cooperative behaviors were a real challenge for analysts to represent and evaluate in a campaign simulation. Ultimately, the team developed a Markov chain to represent the propagated effects of each key Dominator design and environmental parameter up to the estimated number of expected kills per sortie for each aircraft in the campaign scenario. The analysts then transferred this data to the Combat Forces Assessment Model, a campaign simulation tool. Representing the effects in this manner allowed them to use the existing Air Force Studies and Analysis Agency (AFSAA)-approved campaign simulation without modification. Working against a tight deadline, the CIT was not only able to represent Dominator successfully at the campaign level, but was also able to show that one of the layer architectures being considered was clearly superior to the others. The team subsequently used the campaign results to eliminate another possible architecture as well, thereby saving several months of mission simulation development time. Ultimately, the CIT demonstrated that using Dominator in a future military campaign would decrease the time to achieve objectives, the number of sorties required, and the overall campaign costs. The warfighter community considers these metrics of great importance to decisions regarding a new weapon system’s development.
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