1 Perspectives on the Analysis Modeling & Simulation Business Plan

During the past year, the Department of Defense (DoD) has taken major steps to enhance its management of modeling and simulation (M&S) activities. As one facet of that change, it has focused on six functional communities of interest: experimentation, analysis, planning, acquisition, testing, and training. It has charged each functional community with the development of a M&S business plan. The initial result for the analysis community is an Analysis M&S Business Plan designed to support the development, fielding, and application of appropriate M&S capabilities to address national security strategic-level assessment issues. The plan articulates the community’s vision and objectives, compares current capabilities to these objectives to identify gaps, draws on the results of surveys to prioritize those gaps, and formulates initiatives to address the highest priority gaps. These initiatives are aggregated into the categories of focused warfare activities to include redressing deficiencies in M&S of Irregular Warfare; cross-cutting activities that address specific aspects of warfare arenas, such as net-centric operations; and analysis M&S management activities such as proposed changes to M&S governance. The product is intended to be a living document that will be updated on a periodic basis to expand its scope and respond to the evolving needs of the broader analysis community. A