LIFTING OFF OF THE DIGITAL PLATEAU WITH MILITARY DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Armies have used wargames throughout history to increase their chance for victory by gaining an understanding how events might unfold. A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called Deep Green, attempted to introduce wargames during the execution of military operations. DARPA envisioned Deep Green as a military DSS that compared friendly assumptions and predictions of enemy behavior with actual events as they unfolded. However, Deep Green did not achieve this goal due to the combination of two technical obstacles. The first technical obstacle was the underlying simulation and the predictability of warfare. The second technical obstacle was the information available to the decision support system. Developers must address both of these limitations to ascend from the current plateau to a level that would provide useful decision support to a commander.