Measures of Effectiveness for the Information-age Army

📖 The Scoop

The 1990s have witnessed the dawn of what future historians will doubtless call the Information Age. It is clear that the ability to acquire, retrieve, manipulate, and exchange information has had and will continue to have a profound effect on a host of human activities. Warfare is no exception. Although it is clear that information will have a far-reaching effect, quantifying or measuring that effect-how to do so-is far from well understood. Such an understanding is important to the Army, particularly at a time when it is spending a considerable amount of its scarce investment capital on establishing Information-Age links across its forces (the so-called digitization of the Army). As it transforms itself, the Army needs Information-Age analytic tools to help it make the best choices possible. Chief among the analytic tools required are good measures of effectiveness (MOEs) that can demonstrate the value of information in terms of military outcomes. The current set of measures, such as force-exchange and territorial gains or losses, will continue to be useful, but they do not give much visibility to the growing contribution of information. Moreover, they are often calculated with simplistic head-on-head attrition models that omit important processes in which information plays a big role.

Genre: History / Military / Strategy (fancy, right?)