Innovative Combat Simulation to Craft Tomorrow’s UAV Operational Doctrine

This proposal is for the use of state-of-the-art computer wargames to be used in the research on the impact and optimal use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in realistic combat scenarios. High fidelity, historically calibrated wargames ranging from sub-tactical ground-centric game engines through operational, strategic, air campaign, and naval-centric game engines will be used to address the full spectrum of UAVs, their capabilities, and optimal use. These computer wargames all come with a powerful and highly adaptive Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability developed over several years of research and development which allows these wargames to be effectively used in both human-interaction and fully-automated settings. Employing these wargames with this AI feature allows for execution on both interactive and multi-processor computer systems as appropriate for the research being conducted. BENEFIT: UAVs have been a very significant military development recently and are poised to significantly impact all combat scenarios from the very tactical to the strategic in all areas of warfare: ground, air, and naval. As the capabilities of UAVs increases, it is important to anticipate and optimally implement them into combat scenarios. High-fidelity computer wargames together with powerful and highly adaptive AI functionality can be effectively and efficiently used to pursue research into the use of UAVs. It is important that these wargames be effectively calibrated so that any results obtained from them can be viewed with a high level of confidence that they are representative of actual situations. Likewise, it is important that these wargames have both interactive and automated execution modes so that investigations can be carried out both with human-in-the-loop and on high-performance computer systems. The interactive mode supports discoveries of the use of UAVs that might not be realized and understood while the automated modes supports mathematical optimization of their use.