Ness Marlin A. A new land battle for the theater war exercise

Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, School of Engeineering, 1990. — 114 p.The Theater War Exercise (TWX) is a four day, theater level, two sided, airpower employment decision-making exercise run at the Air Force Wargaming Center, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Decisions made by the exercise participants are fed into TWX's air and land battle simulation programs, which then simulate the employment of the air power strategy, doctrine, and war fighting principles inherent in those decisions. TWX was limited for use as a potential joint exercise because of the existing land battle simulation. The old land battle was a standalone simulation whose only interface to the air battle was the passing of sortie information through an intermediate database relation. Additionally, a carefully prepared programming script was used to ensure that the land units performed reasonably. This made it impossible for the land game to react to the air play in any way except through a slowing of land units when on their preprogrammed paths. The goal of this thesis effort was a complete development of a new land combat model program. This was accomplished through a determination of the proper levels of player participation and the required level of aggregation for the land units. A six step object oriented design process was used along with application prototyping for program development. An aggregated interactive theater-level land combat model and its implementation in Ada is described. The model simulates doctrinal planning and decision making operations conducted at Army Group level. It provides credible land combat processes, unit movement and attrition, logistics, and intelligence based on player inputs, air-land unit interactions and terrain characteristics.