Abstract for: Exploring Policy and Initiative Decision Making in a Dynamic Conflict Environment

The need to provide resources to tactical forces requires a long and often vulnerable logistics tail, which draws forces from forward operating areas and exposes support units to hostile action. The additional requirement of securing and transporting resources to tactical forces effectively increase costs, delivery times and challenges the decision making of leaders. This model allows those leaders to investigate energy and infrastructure considerations in a red vs. blue simulated conflict environment. This approach is important as often operations oriented wargames and models discount the requirements for logistics, providing an incomplete examination of the tactical or operational problem. By using System Dynamics, the logistician can investigate those factors that influence and limit operations and identify possible solutions and test initiatives applicable to the logistical problem. The goal of this paper is to outline how a system dynamics model may adequately simulate the battle space such that users may then experiment with logistics policy and initiatives in a gaming environment.