Type of Research: Academic Corporate / Military (Joint Warfare Systems Office)
Summary:
“The Joint Warfare System (JWARS) is a campaign-level model of military operations that is currently being developed under contract by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for use by OSD, the Joint Staff, the Services, and the Warfighting Commands.”
“The following constructs are important to understanding how the JWARS simulation is set up and run:
- Scenario - A specified set of problem domain input data (Playbox, Environment, Order of Battle (OOB), Plans, system performance parameters, etc.)
- Replication - A single execution of a scenario, corresponding to unique initial random number seed.
- Run - Scenario data set plus user-selected control data, including identification of data to be captured, number of replications to be run, initial replication number (surrogate for random number seed), etc.
- Run Definition — A named, stored set of parameters defining a run.”
“When a run is submitted for execution, the JWARS administrative control system (JACS) assigns the run an identification code based on time stamp, e.g., J2001-04-30- 163955690000. That run ID is included in all outputs from the run.”
“JWARS analysis products consist of reports addressing essential elements of analysis (EEAs), quantified by measures that are calculated from data elements captured by instruments during the simulation. From the bottom up, these terms are defined as follow:
- Data element - E.g., heading, longitude, unit ID, missile type, current unit activity, and current unit attrition.
- Instrument — technically, a specific software method (used in the object-oriented programming sense) designed to capture and output a set of data elements whenever it is triggered.
- Measure — a quantitative result computed from data elements; JWARS also uses the term measure to the collection of instruments and data elements needed to calculate that result.
- Report - a set of instrument output data or measures that have been processed into a graph or table that helps to answer one or more EEAs.
- Essential element of analysis - an aggregate-level grouping concept found within the HCI System. EEAs may be considered as both: (1) statements of the overarching questions that the decision maker seeks to answer (e.g., “Are forces in Theater X sufficient to prevent Nation Y from pushing from the DMZ to the yy Parallel in less than eight days?”); and (2) a means for selecting those instruments and measures contributing to the resolution of the question (e.g., the instruments and measures shown in the relationships page of the EEA).
Another class of outputs consists of information generated and displayed to the user’s workstation during a replication. This includes:
- Message — a debug-like text string written to a message log, when triggered by an associated simulation event.
- Message category — a logical grouping of messages, e.g., “Simulation Model - C4ISR.”
- Message log — the sequential file of messages generated during the JWARS replication. The JWARS user may choose to have this file displayed in a message log window during simulation execution and saved following the run.
- Active map — a visual map display of the campaign, replete with military as well as geographical entities. (JWARS also provides a capability to play back the replication on the map after the simulation is finished)”
In addition JWARS can output data via CSV (Comma Separated Values) files for charts such as this:
Comments:
JWARS is THE wargame / military simulation used by the Pentagon to plan all military actions. In many ways it is reminiscent of AMVER that I was introduced to during the SimSAR II project for MSIAC:
The application certainly appears to be rude and crude by commercial computer game standards. It is, apparently restricted to 16 colors and an interface that looks like it was written in Visual Basic.
See also Logistics Modeling in JWARS for a PowerPoint presentation about the history of JWARS and it the future enhancements planned for it.
