Course of Action Analysis for Coalition Operations

A prototype Decision Support System for Coalition Operations (DSCCO) is being developed by SPAWAR Systems Center – San Diego to support the Operations Planning Team (OPT) of the Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Command. The goal of DSCCO is to apply and integrate organizational design concepts and decision support technologies in planning and executing multi-national coalition operations. Within DSSCO, there is a module based on CAESAR II focused on the analysis of alternative Courses of Action (COAs). The capabilities of DSSCO and the CAESAR II / COA module were demonstrated in November 2000 at USCINCPAC. Subject matter expects (SMEs) collaborated in a distributed manner in developing the structure (the relationships between causes and effects) and the data of an Influence Net model representing a key outcome in a hypothetical military operation other than war (MOOTW) in a South Pacific scenario. The influence net was implemented in the CAESAR II / COA module, and sensitivity analysis was used to determine which actions could contribute substantially in achieving the desired effects. Those selected actions formed the basis for the construction of COAs, namely, time-phased sequences of these events. The CAESAR II / COA module was used to illustrate the impact of time-coordinated actions of the coalition partners to the decisionmakers.