electronic warfare self-protection of battlefield helicopters - Aaltodoc

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sources, which the EW specialist is likely to meet only if working on specialized
subjects. Building the whole picture of factors contributing to EWSP is therefore a
major effort also for the EW specialist.
The term “holistic view” in the title of this study emerged from the original idea of
conducting a systems thinking study on EWSP of battlefield helicopters. Since the
expression “a systems view” may be confusing—particularly to engineers—the latter
part of the title was changed to the less ambiguous “a holistic view”. The term
“systems thinking” is controversial. 14 Systems thinking can be practiced in more than
one way [Cau01]. It is partly a reaction to the inability of traditional “hard”
operational research (OR) methods to deal with complex, unstructured problems.
Forrester [For 94] states that “’systems thinking’ has no clear definition or usage
(….) [it] is coming to mean little more than thinking about systems, talking about
systems, and acknowledge that systems are important.” This view is challenged in
Sterman [Ste00 p.38], and in Caulfield and Maj [Cau01], where Forrester system
dynamics (FSD) 15 is seen as a subgroup of systems thinking. Espejo [Esp94] defines
the related term “systemic thinking” as “learning how to manage situational
complexity”. 16 The statement “The bottom line of systems thinking is leverage—
seeing where actions and changes can lead to significant, enduring improvements”
[Sen90 p.114] is intriguing, since finding a leverage point in EWSP is in line with the
objectives of the present work.
The term “emergence” is used in connection with complex systems [Con02].
According to one definition “(…) the idea of emergence is used to indicate the
arising of patterns, structures, or properties that do not seem adequately explained by
referring only to the system’s pre-existing components and their interactions.”
[Anon03] This definition can be rewritten into a guideline for the present study: “To
indicate patterns, structures, or properties in the field of EWSP of battlefield
helicopters, which do not seem adequately explained by referring only to the preexisting
EWSP components and their interactions.”
The conclusion is that the present work is a multidisciplinary enterprise. Its emphasis
is on EWSP but within the realm of engineering it is most appropriately classified as
belonging to systems engineering, given that the following definition is accepted:
“Systems engineering is a branch of engineering which concentrates on the design
14 Indeed, the term “system” is controversial because it has both a common everyday usage and a
wider meaning. Checkland [Che99 pp.306-307] traces this problem back to Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a
biologist who in the late 1940s suggested that ideas about organisms as whole entities could be
generalized to refer to wholes of any kind called “systems”.
15 A) Forrester system dynamics (FSD) is termed ”system dynamics” by its practitioners—embodied
by its inventor, Prof. Jay W Forrester, the System Dynamics Society, the journal System Dynamics
Review, and a vast body of literature on the subject [For61,95]. The conventional term has been
modified in the present work in order to avoid confusion with ordinary engineering system dynamics:
dynamical phenomena in power lines, vibrating mechanical structures, oscillating control systems, etc.
B) Dangerfield and Roberts [Dan96] claims that Forrester was influenced by Tustin who had applied
the ideas of the control engineer to economic systems already in the early 1950s. Tustin’s name does
not appear on Forrester’s seminal Industrial Dynamics, A Major Breakthrough for Decision Makers
[For58].
16 The terms “systems thinking” and “systemic thinking” are regarded interchangeable in the present
work. This is in accordance with Checkland and Scholes [Che99 p.18], which regards the word
systemic a legitimate adjective of the word system, with the meaning “of or concerning a system as a
whole”.