Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 100

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Soldiers from the British Royal Artillery inside a simulation tent 5 March 2015 during Exercise Steel Sabre at the Otterburn Training Area,
Northumberland, United Kingdom. The simulation system uses 360-degree technology to enhance training realism.

The commander and staff have only seven hours until
their mission commences. For planning, they need to
assemble threat and friendly force information, intelligence products, environmental data, logistic requirements, and other planning material.
In the past, the development and evaluation of viable
courses of action (COAs) would have largely been driven
by experience, doctrine, and best practices contributed
by a small staff group.3 In 2020, however, Task Force
Justice also uses the force agility—crowdsourced development of tactics (FA-CDT) technology, a new way to
develop and analyze COAs. Using a structured process
with the FA-CDT technology, the staff systematically
produces five viable COAs, based on
crowdsourced, tactical game play gathered
from over one million global players using mobile
platforms that incorporate the latest threat tactics,
war-gaming of COAs against one hundred
thousand threat simulations to produce success
probabilities,
big data to analyze and improve the five
draft COAs for Task Force Justice, and
a systematic twelve-step process.
After developing and analyzing COAs (in steps
3 and 4 of the MDMP), Task Force Justice begins

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comparing their COAs (in step 5) with tactical planning options created, tested, improved, and delivered
for approval and final planning. Their technology integrates crowdsourcing, big data, and mobile-gaming
technology from a global military user base to create
the best chance of tactical success.

Effective Responses to Future
Challenges
The Army needs an FA-CDT technology platform
that will allow design, validation, war-gaming, and
dynamic analysis for creating plans with the greatest
probability of success in the shortest time possible.
Three pieces of technology in use today that can drive
the future of Army planning are crowdsourcing, big
data, and mobile gaming. The way to revolutionize
Army tactical mission planning is through a mobile-gaming platform that could be offered to thousands, or even millions, of users and then have the
results analyzed using big data analytics.
The key question concerning military challenges
in 2020 and beyond is what path do leaders take to
prepare for a successful future? Two possible ways
to prepare for future military operations are to (1)
attempt to predict where future wars will be and why,
May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW