Experimentation for C2 Concepts & Technologies
Because of its focus on evidence, EBR has long been a leader in the field of experimentation. The corporate specialty in measurement and metrics made it a ready resource in the late 1990s when the Department of Defense (DoD) discovered that it needed to use formal experimentation because the emerging national security threats and rapidly changing information technology field meant it had to plan for situations for which it had little or no “real world” experience. In such circumstances, modeling and experimentation (including model driven experiments) are among the few approaches that can yield valid and reliable insight into and knowledge about how to design forces, create command and control approaches and systems to make them effective, and prepare key people to operate successfully.
EBR’s leadership in this field is indicated by its deep involvement in helping DoD build the expertise necessary to design, execute, and exploit campaigns of experimentation. When the J-9 at Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) asked the CCRP to develop guidance for line officers about experiments, EBR senior staff co-authored the book, Code of Best Practice: Experimentation, which has been widely adopted. When the successor J-9 asked the CCRP to help that same community understand how to build knowledge cumulatively over time, Dr. Richard E. Hayes, EBR’s president, co-authored Code of Best practice: Campaigns of Experimentation, which has also been widely circulated and used. EBR’s staff have, over the past several years, also staffed the CCRP’s Center of Excellence in Experimentation which has given formal courses on experimentation to a number of organizations, including JFCOM, NORTHCOM, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation ACT), and the Singapore Armed Forces. The CoE in Experimentation has also worked at the seminar level with the USMC, Strong Angel II and II, Golden Phoenix 07, and the USAF.
EBR’s team has also been directly responsible for organizing and coordinating specific experiments, including a JFCOM experiment focused on selecting the best approach to creating Situational Awareness and Shared Awareness in a combat staff, a series of experiments for DARPA in the design and development of the Command Post of the Future, and experiments to measure the effectiveness of new methods for applying Sensemaking tools to the problem of analyzing adversary terrorist organizations and insurgencies.
Finally, over the past five years EBR has been responsible for working with other partners in the CCRP to develop the Experimental Laboratory for Investigating Collaboration, Information-sharing, and Trust (ELICIT). The original version of ELICIT is a man-in-the-loop experimentation platform that has been used dozens of times at the Naval Postgraduate School, the Portuguese Military Academy, West Point, Harvard, Boston University, Cranfield University in the UK, the National Defense University, and in Singapore. EBR provides guidance and technical support for these applications and captures the data files resulting from them. For selected issues, EBR also conducts research that cuts across the different users.