October 2000 Newsletter - Naval Postgraduate School

RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
WEAPONEERING: FROM A JTCG/ME PERSPECTIVE, continued from page 10
In May 1999, the Office of the Secretary of Defense
(OSD) revised DoD Directive 5000.2R to require the
procuring agency to provide weapon effectiveness data
for use in JMEMs for weapons in the acquisition process
prior to their achieving initial operational capability.
OSD also required that these data be prepared using
methodology coordinated with the JTCG/ME.
The resources to operate the program are distributed
to the JTCG/ME directly from the Director of Operational
Test and Evaluation, Office of the Secretary of
Defense. Chartered by the Joint Logistics Commanders
with two-star or civilian-equivalent Offices of Primary
Responsibility (OPR), the JTCG/ME is guided by a
steering committee composed of members from each of
the services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J-8), the Defense
Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Threat Reduction
Agency. The Army continues as DoD Executive Agent,
as it had been with the original ad hoc group, and the Director
of the U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity at the
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, presides. The committee
is composed of civilian and military weapon/munitions
experts throughout the defense department to ensure objective,
scientific guidance in the development and employment
of non-nuclear munitions. An organizational chart is shown
in Figure 1.
NPS Involvement With the JTCG/ME
About six years ago, Professor Morris Driels of the Depart-
Figure 2. Target Acquisition Program in JAWS.
Figure 1. Organization of the JTCG/ME.
ment of Mechanical Engineering was interested in pursuing a
new direction in his research activities, branching away from
the more traditional Mechanical Engineering subject matter
he had been working with at several universities for over
twenty five years. He had learned of the JTCG through a
colleague in the Operations Research Department at NPS,
and they began work on a project that predicted the probability
that ground targets could be detected, recognized and
identified from the air. By this time, the Air-to-Surface
Working Group -ASWG (Figure 1) based at Eglin AFB was
consolidating its products into a CD-ROM and away from
the traditional orange covered paper JMEMs that users
were familiar with since the inception of the group. This
product, known as the Joint Air-to-Surface
Weaponeering System, or JAWS, is the focal point of all
Air-to-Surface (AS) activities, and although not a strict
part of weaponeering, the Target Acquisition program
developed at NPS was incorporated into it in 1998. A
sample screen is shown in Figure 2, and indicates the
probability a target may be detected as a function of
altitude, terrain masking, target size and contrast, and
other factors.
Following this work, Professor Driels became involved
in the analysis of the delivery accuracy of weapons,
particularly that of the AGM-65 Maverick missile and
the GBU 31/32 JDAM guided bomb. He was also
vaguely aware of the other components of weaponeering
that others were working on, and needed to be done
--continued on page 12
NPS Research page 11
October 2000