Science & Military 2/2010 67 ASPECTS REGARDING THE USE OF INNOVATIVE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN MILITARY APPLICATIONS Alexandru GĂLUŞCĂ, Traian ANASTASIE, Gabriela PRELIPCEAN, Ionică CÎRCIU , Mircea BOSCOIANU Abstract: The sustained progress in ICT represents an opportunity to develop new models for military decision making, more accurate, more robust. The interest is to build a flexible framework capable to support decision makers in military applications. The complexity of force planning and operations planning is influenced by the high uncertainty and the new dynamics that affects an extended set of factors (political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure). The response based on different type of instruments (diplomatic, information, military, economic) should be supported by a new framework, capable to offer the power of selection is given by the limitation of resources. The use of modeling and simulation offer a better understanding of the concepts and solutions for commander’s decision making. The new paradigm to adopt a flexible, adaptive, and robust solution is totally different from the classic planning and is focused on the exploitation of the strengths elements of the human creativity and knowledge. New analytical framework will offer also effective instruments in real time, capable to support the optimal decision making. Keywords: MDMP (military decision making process), DSS (decision support systems), modeling and simulation (M&S), military applications. 1 AN INTRODUCTION IN THE ANALYSIS OF INNOVATIVE DSS FOR MILITARY APPLICATIONS Military decision making is very complex and is influenced by risk and uncertainty. The interest is to select and adapt different analytic instruments inspired from decision theory to modern military systems. The normative study of decisions should be viewed as an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary task based on management, mathematics, statistics, economics, politics, sociology, psychology. Standard decision theory is characterized by an attempt to decontextualise decisions. The interest is on the relative probabilities of the outcome of decisions, described in the terms of their impact on a person’s total utility, not from the point of view of a particular gain/ loss in the decision situation. A paradigm in decision theory is attributed to the Prospect theory (Kahneman-Tversky, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002), a descriptive theory of making risky choices, via an innovative reintroducing of the contextual information as relevant to real rather than normative decisions. In the typical framework of a high-level DSS, consistent with an uncertainty, sensitive, top-down approach is important to transform the vision about dealing with risk and uncertainty, and providing a dynamic recognized picture of the battlefield, the comparative potential of actors and their logistics, equipped with zoom capabilities. DSS are based on advanced analytic instruments capable to build a robust framework for high-level decisions. In military applications, risk mitigation should be covered effectively and multiple mechanisms capable to create dedicated flexible, adaptive and robust (FAR) strategies are needed. The focus is on the ways to mitigate the risks in the context of FAR strategies. The application for commanders should offer more intuition in the design of different solutions, by incorporating all relevant factors in a dynamic manner. In the modern military systems there are different types of decisions, from analytic to intuitive/ naturalistic to rational/analytic. DSS designers tend to favor rational-analytic methods, but real-world commanders often lean toward intuitive methods, arguing that models and simulations could not respond to the FAR strategies. But, in the modern literature, it is recognized that the top-down decision support should accommodate both types of thinking, attempting to exploit the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of each and is based on the both lines: rational commanders are aware that the options presented to them may lack creativity, imagination; intuitive commanders are aware that risks exist in executing their strategies. A mix between the two types of thinking could be interesting. One candidate for this mixed framework is based on the portfolio-style method, inspired from economics, and capable to balance the risks, and the foresight exercises method, inspired from psychology, that addresses the need to include human factors in dealing with high risk and uncertainty. The new framework to adopt FAR’s style decisions, is different from planning for the best- estimate future and should include both innovative rational models like agent-based models, issues taken from control theory, game-theoretic simulation, the operations research, applied to military systems, but also human-intensive methods (war-gaming, foresight exercises, Red-teaming,