The Effects of Changing Force Structure on Thunder Output.

Abstract

In today's reduction of America's national defense, campaign level models are being used more in the development of force structure. The effects of drawdown are of significant interest to those at the highest levels of authority. Campaign models can bring those high ranking officials the answers they seek with high confidence. THUNDER is a campaign model used frequently by the United States Air Force and many of its contractors. The effects of changing the force structure within THUNDER require modifying variables before executing a new experimental run. Changes in such issues as force structure cannot be immediately addressed. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) can be used to provide a quick answer to effects of changing force structure by executing several experimental runs at a variety of settings. The creation of a 'response surface' interlinks each scenario. Factor analysis is a multivariate statistics method of reducing dimensionality of data sets and determining relationships between measures on an observation. From this, relationships can be found among different measures of effectiveness to create new, simpler variables. The methods used in this thesis provide a means for creating accurate, 'quick turn' analysis tools which a decision maker can use to make timely decisions.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1996
Accession Number
ADA324222

Entities

People

  • Michael R. Farmer

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerial Warfare
  • Air Force
  • Air Superiority Fighters
  • Attack Aircraft
  • Computational Science
  • Data Science
  • Data Sets
  • Databases
  • Factor Analysis
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Force Structure
  • Information Science
  • Measures Of Effectiveness
  • Regression Analysis
  • Statistics
  • United States
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies