monitoring

UNCLASSIFIED
DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
6.2.1. Why is a National Testing Capability for Monitoring and Verification Needed?
There are many inter‐related reasons. The comprehensive monitoring regime the Task Force
proposes is a system of systems that must work together, and is too complicated to plan/assess
on paper and/or with piecemeal testing. Furthermore, experience shows that operators
typically learn to use actual monitoring systems differently and often better than system
design/analysis would predict. Two examples illustrate the point:
• Past experience in radiation detection operations; e.g., Operation Morning Light (the
1978 deployment to search for and recover debris from a reactor‐powered Soviet
RORSAT that re‐entered in northern Canada); and Navy experience in detection of
shipboard nuclear weapons. In both cases, operators learned to reject clutter and
spurious signals by identifying patterns inherent in their own operations and/or in the
larger context. For example, in Morning Light, radiation signatures from the low‐grade
uranium‐ore deposits that are ubiquitous in Northern Canada confounded the search
operations in the first days. But operators identified the source of the spurious signals,
and learned that the radiation signatures from these deposits rose and declined more
slowly, as the search platforms flew across the terrain, than the radiation signatures of
the point‐targets they were looking for, and could be sorted out on that basis;
• Recent experience in the development of new‐generation tactical ISR in the Counter IED
fight discussed elsewhere in this report; learning from operational experience in
Iraq/Afghanistan (“on the job training”), has been coupled with iteration in experiments
in various DoD testing and training facilities (e.g., the National Training Center [NTC]) to
not only train deploying units but also to anticipate next steps in adversary tactics,
techniques and procedures (TTPs).
The need to learn from experimentation and experience is even greater in the areas addressed
by this Task Force, where an adaptive adversary and/or one with sophisticated denial and
deception is likely to be involved.
The advantages of a testing capability are many and compelling. It would or could:
• Provide a focal point for planning, iterating/adapting, and operating the system of
systems;
• Help integrate the technically disparate and organizationally disaggregated activities
that comprise the national monitoring system;
• Better couple developers and users and provide an experimental basis for net
assessment and risk management;
• Provide ground‐truth performance metrics for technologies and operations, in part as a
basis for future spirals;
• Stimulate sorely needed new ideas;
• Expose “subcritical” programs because planning experiments would force development
of concrete requirements and CONOPs;
DSB TASK FORCE REPORT Chapter 6: Experiment to Iterate and Adapt: National Testing Capability | 66
Nuclear Treaty Monitoring Verification Technologies
UNCLASSIFIED