Exploring Fog of War Concepts in Wargame Scenarios
Information
Date
March 2021
Summary
This thesis explores fog of war concepts through three submitted journal articles. The Department of Defense (DoD) and United States Air Force are attempting to analyze war scenarios to aid the decision-making process; fog modeling improves realism in these wargame scenarios. The first article “Navigating an Enemy Contested Area with a Parallel Search Algorithm” [1] investigates a parallel algorithm speedup, compared to the sequential implementation, with varying map configurations in a tile-based wargame. The parallel speedup tends to exceed 50 but in certain situations. The sequential algorithm outperforms it depending on the configuration of enemy location and amount on the map. The second article “Modeling Fog of War Effects in AFSIM” [2] introduces the Fog Analysis Tool (FAT) for the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM) to introduce and manipulate fog in wargame scenarios. FAT integrates into AFSIM version 2.7.0 and scenario results verify the tool’s fog effects for positioning error, hits, and probability affect the success rate. The third article “Applying Fog Analysis Tool to AFSIM Multi-Domain CLASS scenarios” [3] furthers the verification of FAT to introduce fog across all warfighting domains using a set of Cyber Land Air Sea Space (CLASS) scenarios. The success rate trends with fog impact for each domain scenario support FAT’s effectiveness in disrupting the decision-making process for multi-domain operations. The three articles demonstrate fog can affect search, tasking, and decision-making processes for various types of wargame scenarios. The capabilities introduced in this thesis support wargame analysts to improve decision-making in AFSIM military scenarios.