4.2 MODELING AND SIMULATION REPLACES SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
This inability to replace the Cold War scenario with a credible alternative began to undermine the legitimacy of the process we employed during the Cold War to control command technology and, with it, the legitimacy of the systems analysis method upon which that process rested. The advances in computer technology that have recently taken place in the commercial sector completed the decline in the fortunes of systems analysis by encouraging the analytic community to believe that they could simply replace the art of systems analysis with computer simulation.
Originally a mere quantitative technique created by systems analysts to take advantage of the increasing computational capabilities offered by modern computers, modeling and simulation has quickly developed a reputation for being able to mimic the reality of war. According to the popular view, the war that unfolds inside the large computers housing these simulations is a perfect replica of a real war. Therefore, a simulated war should be able to reveal to the decision maker all that he or she needs to know about war without having to thereby incur the cost and inconvenience of actually fighting one.
Since the outcomes of a properly constructed simulation would thus capture all that is relevant about war, they can be used as a basis for making acquisition decisions, even decisions involving considerable funding. In fact, provided with a set of two high-fidelity simulations, one playing out the entire war and the other costing out that enterprise, the decision maker should be able to sit down, play out alternative technologies on both computers, and then choose the most cost-effective alternative for acquisition. The aim of modeling and simulation is therefore no longer to aid systems analysis in its primary job of illuminating the decision maker’s judgment, but, rather, to provide him with a decision already made. Under the circumstances, systems analysis becomes unnecessary.
It must be pointed out, however, that this surpassing is not an equivalent replacement; the practice of modeling and simulation is not the same thing as the art of systems analysis. The fundamental difference between them consists in the way understanding and calculation are related to each other. In systems analysis, understanding comes first and calculation is intended to merely illustrate that prior understanding. In modeling and simulation calculation comes first and understanding is expected to flow from the numerical results of that calculation much as the laws of science flow from experimental data.
But simulation is a human construct, not objective reality and therefore its results are not experimental data. Under the circumstances, one cannot seriously expect to gain from a simulation any understanding that has not already been used in constructing it. Indeed, to simulate everything that takes place in a war requires that the creator already understand everything that he includes into the simulation. For instance, inclusion of a particular military operation, requires that the laws governing the unfolding of that operation be sufficiently understood to numerically model their action, that its relationships to other military operations be fully accounted for, and that the values of all the inputs controlling that operation be known in advance. But such knowledge is not available to the creator of a simulation unless he has already understood the essence of that operation in advance. Absent such a prior understanding of the operation, a simulation merely includes the creator’s representation of that operation, and therefore cannot be a replacement for understanding it. In the end, one cannot bootstrap oneself out of the need to understand the structure of a system before one models it.
By replacing systems analysis with modeling and simulation one is therefore passing the creator’s construct for reality. If that construct captured the main features of reality, the consequences of this replacement would be minor; if, however, it did not, the consequences could be very serious, particularly if large sums of money were committed to the development of some new weapon system exclusively upon the strength of modeling and simulations.
Recognizing this danger, systems analysis was expressly designed to avoid it. Instead of pursuing the unattainable goal of numerically describing the reality of war, systems analysis uses its deliberative method to understand the key issues that drive a given decision and then puts that understanding in the service of the decision maker’s judgment. Thus, the resulting decision properly reflects the decision maker’s judgment about those key issues, not his detailed understanding of how the war unfolds. Simulation models, on the other hand, by claiming to replace understanding with a description of reality, can not illuminate the decision maker’s judgment; all that they can do is relate uncertainty in output to the uncertainty in input under the questionable assumption that the laws governing the operations included in the model were correctly rendered and then present the output to the decision maker as recommended decisions.
By thus replacing a judgmental process with calculated outcomes, the practice of modeling and simulation thinks of itself as quantitative science. Since most modelers and simulators hail from the scientific community or have had extensive scientific training, it was perhaps inevitable that, despite the better judgment of the military personnel involved, modeling and simulation should begin to think of itself as a science. Not only are its tools specific applications of known scientific methodologies, but even the general approach to problem solving employed by it heavily borrows from the scientific attitude.
One important thing that modeling and simulation borrowed from the scientific community is their deeply held belief that science represents an objective description of reality; there is no room in quantitative science for the vagaries of human behavior, for the non-quantitative categories of discussion and deliberation, for the decision making process, or for anything as militarily important as human proficiency, leadership, and discipline. Therefore, modelers and simulators have instinctively avoided encounter with these non-scientific issues and gravitated almost exclusively to those questions that would lend themselves to scientific treatment. It is not that modelers are unaware of the role that human activity plays in military matters, for they are; rather, it is that in their opinion, the Department’s decision-making process would not be significantly distorted if these features were missing from those models and simulations which decision makers routinely use to inform their deliberations. Since modeling and simulation cannot handle human behavior, it argues that it is not important.
Biased by this “scientific” view of military operations, modeling and simulation is naturally inclined to misunderstand utility as capability, capability as weapon performance, and humans as a source of inefficiency. Unable to capture the judgmental character of the word “utility”, modeling and simulation is in the habit of concluding that anything which improves capability would by definition be militarily useful. Similarly, unable to capture the role of infrastructure activities in military operations, modeling and simulation is in the habit of concluding that weapon systems are more important to winning a war than their support system and, therefore, that tooth could function well without its tail. Finally, unable to capture the human dimension of warfare, modeling and simulation is in the habit of concluding that replacing humans with automated machines would be a good idea.
Under the circumstances, acquisition decisions based only upon modeling and simulation are of necessity incomplete; although the models employed would probably include a detailed quantitative description of the effect that structure expenditures may have upon military capability, they could not include any quantitative estimate of the effect that infrastructure expenditures with its heavy dependence on human activity would have upon that capability. At the end of the day, the decision could, for all the decision maker knows, reduce the nation’s military capability rather than enhance it.