2.3 THE AMERICAN PRACTICE OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
The General Staff officer used intellectual discourse and scientific method to plan for campaigns that would be fought with the weapon systems that were in general use at the time. The point of his work was not to seek new weapons with which to fight the enemy, but rather to seek new and more efficient ways of fighting him with the weapons at hand by taking into account aforehand the specific location of the projected war and the character of the enemy and his tactics. Systems analysis, while preserving the staff officer’s use of intellectual discourse and scientific method, changes the intention of his work: it keeps the nature of the campaign fixed while seeking the weapon system that would provide for the most effective outcome, taking into account aforehand the specific character of enemy weapons and tactics. In this way, systems analysis becomes a fundamental tool in the hands of decision makers faced with the complex, and often daunting, job of choosing new weapons systems from the vast spectrum of alternatives made available by command technology.
Aside from bringing a measure of objectivity to the essentially politically driven debate about future weapons, systems analysis provided a number of specific analytic tools with the help of which the choice of weapons could be made on the basis of reproducible, quantitative measures. All of these tools require a planning scenario which specifies the campaign setting within which the alternative weapon systems are to be assessed. The planning scenario takes the place of the General Staff officer’s future campaign, and often carries with it equally detailed specification of geography, protagonist, and military objective.
The most important contribution of a planning scenario is that it provided the military decision makers with the ability to discipline command technology by explicitly enrolling its creative energies in the service of national security. A properly constructed scenario should naturally capture the capabilities and likely behavior of the enemy, as well as the strategy and tactics that would help our forces attain the ultimate victory over that enemy within the geographic and political circumstances prevailing at the time of the campaign. Therefore, the scenario setting, embodying as it does the most important information about how the nation intends to fight the war against a specified enemy, provides the analyst with just the right context for calculating both the advantages and the disadvantages associated with alternative weapon system designs. Guided by such a context, analysts will ultimately recommend to the military decision maker a design that will reflect, because of the very way in which it was constructed, the fundamental tenets of our national security interests, not the natural instincts of the technological community.
Within the planning scenario, the various alternatives are compared according to a large variety of measures of merit, some exclusively dedicated to assessing effectiveness in performance, others to costing the development and production of the new weapon systems under consideration. Choosing the weapon system that is most effective at a common level of expenditure, for instance, is a very popular, though by no means unique, method of controlling the vast choice made possible by command technology. A more detailed description of systems analysis and its tools is given in the next chapter.