From Laboratory to Field—Testing A2C2 Concepts During Global Warfare Exercises

Abstract

Global Wargame '99 offered the A2C2 team a unique opportunity to witness a large-scale exploration of Network Centric Warfare (NCW) concepts in the context of an extended operational exercise. The team became involved in Global `99 three months prior to the game through their interaction with a team of warfighters with whom they conducted a training exercise at the Naval Postgraduate School entitled "Bridge to Global `99." During that training exercise, the A2C2 modeling team introduced a model-based organizational structure designed to optimally support the demands of the Global scenario. CCG1 and a staff of roughly 30 officers played the organization in a laboratory at the Naval Postgraduate School while the A2C2 assessment team observed, collected a range of performance measures, provided detailed feedback about the impacts of Information Technology (IT) tools, assessed the function of the organization relative to model predictions, and captured team processes that evolved and improved as the game progressed. The positive outcome of this experience led CCG1 to recommend a variation on the A2C2 architecture for the Global Wargame itself. This presented the A2C2 team with an unprecedented opportunity to follow a model-based architecture from the laboratory to the field. Although Global '99 was not an experiment in the classical sense, the exercise did manipulate three central components of NCW: model-driven innovations in organizational design, new C2 processes to match changes in command organization, and the availability of advanced information technologies and collaboration tools. This paper describes Global Wargame `99 from the A2C2 perspective, including the methods they used there to capture data and the lessons they learned from the experience.