Military Operations Research Society (MORS)
The Military Operations Research Society (MORS) is a mission-critical non-profit organization that educates, supports, and connects data analysts and operations researchers from the military, government, industry and academia to enhance the quality of analysis that informs national and homeland security decisions.
Upcoming Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Events
Join us Friday, 28 August at noon ET for the next MORS-Talk. Mr. Mark Stankiewicz will join us to present A Collaborative M&S Environment: Enterprise Tools, Licensing, and Access to Compute.
This discussion will explore stitching together disparate networks and offering a user interface to access tools and enterprise licensing with the ability to leverage HPC, Commercial cloud, and on-prem compute resources.
Mr. Mark D. Stankiewicz is Acting Chief Modeling and Simulation Officer and Director of Enterprise Modeling and Simulation at the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force Studies and Analysis (SAF/SA) at the Pentagon. He reports to the Director of SAF/SA, the Secretary, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the Chief of Space Operations, for developing and implementing the Department of the Air Force (DAF) enterprise modeling and simulation strategy.
He leads a military, civilian, and contractor group examining and developing architectures to provide the DAF with a model repository, shared license library, and single login authentication across networks. His team manages the Advanced Framework for Simulation (AFSIM) at the joint and enterprise level and is responsible for the development of the next generation of campaign analytic tools for the DoD. He sits as the Air Force’s liaison to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Analytic Working Group’s Modeling and Simulation sub-group.
Mr. Stankiewicz has over 24 years of experience in the U.S. Department of Defense, with the majority spent as an operations research analyst for the Department of the Air Force, developing strategic analysis and models. Mr. Stankiewicz started out designing manufacturing equipment in Massachusetts. In 1997, he moved to the DC area to design ship parts for the Navy as a contractor. He worked on the DDG 51 class Destroyers and the PMS 385 Strategic Sealift programs. In 1999, he switched contracting firms to support the Air Force, where he performed mission level analysis supporting Air Force POM scenarios in the Air Force Studies and Analyses office. In 2005, Mr. Stankiewicz was detailed to support Air Force Checkmate, providing strategic analytic support to current day operations. In addition to his experience with the Air Force, he served as an analyst for the Joint Staff J-8 Warfighting Analysis Directorate, analyzing and assessing current day operations plans. He spent five years as a technical advisor for future warfare analysis, reviewing and ensuring the analytic integrity of studies and analyses, and managing the resources and computing required to perform speed-of-relevance analysis informing senior leader decisions on future warfighting capabilities and resource allocation.
Join us Friday, 11 September at noon ET for the next MORS-Talk. Mr. Josh Helms, Technical Director at the Center for Army Analysis, will join us to present The AI Chasm: Balancing Technical Realities and Force Design Risks.
Integrating AI into the Department of War requires solving two distinct problems: technical network access and ethical risk management. Currently, most generative AI tools remain isolated on unclassified networks, leaving the analytic workforce starved of these advanced capabilities on classified systems.
This session discusses how this technical disconnect, paired with ethical constraints, impacts force design. Industry is trying to develop AI enabled tools to help us with more advanced analytics, but network security managers will not allow them on classified networks. But if we had them on our networks, would it be appropriate to use them for force design? If we mathematically optimize capability requirements via AI warplanning agents, we create a dangerous delta between the AI's "optimal" plan and a commander's ethically constrained, human-approved execution. Could this result in a commander not having the forces and resources to achieve victory on the battlefield? Join this session to debate the critical technical, security, ethical, and resource allocation risks of the AI designed force.
Mr. Helms is the Technical Director of the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) where he is responsible for overseeing a study and analysis program that affects Program Objective Memorandum submissions, senior leader decisions for contingency and operational plans, and the maintenance and process improvements for four models that are recognized as the Army standard for data development and wargaming.
The MORS Certificate in Survey Process is a four-day course for all analysts seeking to gain a practical understanding in the various aspects of research survey methodology. The course will cover the basic principles of survey research and will provide participants with guidance in the design and execution of high-quality surveys.
MORS has partnered with Virginia Tech to offer this certificate. Participants will receive a number Continuing Education Units (CEUs) upon completion, in accordance with the number of contact hours determined by Virginia Tech.
Objectives:
Our expert instructor will guide participants through the key aspects of properly designing, fielding, and analyzing surveys. A variety of topics will be covered, including:
- Survey instrument design
- How to avoid pitfalls and ensure the capture of quality data
- Rules of thumb and pain-points when crafting survey questions
- Modes of data collection
- Statistical estimation
- Methods and use cases for survey data analysis
Overview
Global security interests are closely tied to the reliable provision of infrastructure, from the physical basing infrastructure that enables training and deployment to the communications infrastructure that connect forces. Recent attacks on infrastructure—both physical and cyber—highlight the risks to global defense, along with the impacts to military operations. This meeting will focus on bringing together global partners in security to discuss the challenges of infrastructure creation, modernization, protection, and recovery from disruptive incidents, including both deliberate attacks and non-deliberate impacts.
Goals and Objectives
This three-day workshop will convene subject-matter experts in diverse fields of critical infrastructure with focus on increasing resilience, particularly in relation to energy, cybersecurity, and infrastructure in the age of increasing utilization of AI and ML.
Focus Areas:
- Energy
- Cybersecurity
- Supply Chains
Following a discussion-based format in group settings, the participants will exchange ideas, perspectives, and insights informed by research, organizational operations, and personal experience. To frame these discussions, the organizing committee will source keynote speakers to address the workshop participants at a strategic level. The goal is to provide a venue and participation to set up a framework during the workshop that organizations can use to develop follow-on actions to dive deeper into their organization’s critical infrastructure needs based on the needs and priorities of their organization.
This workshop will encompass all aspects of wargame and wargame design, but with a focus on how wargaming can support analysis of disruptive technologies and industrial base issues. Papers are welcome on all aspects of wargaming, but we challenge you to think about how wargaming supports and can focus on analysis of disruptive strategies and alternative procurement processes.
The DoD’s “commercial first” policies have been followed up by a movement of technology disruptors into the defense space. They seek to disrupt not only how the military innovates, but also how it fights, and how it builds an industrial base that meets the requirements of the long war. Gaming can provide the base from which to make decisions about disruption. Manual gaming is fast, able to keep up with the pace of change. It also represents an inexpensive way to test new ideas and warfighting concepts. What manual gaming has not done is focus on the long war and the logistical, industrial, and social aspects of a multi-year, peer competitor, war where the national production and global economics will drive the warfight.
Overview
The MORS Certificate in Wargaming is a five-day course designed to enhance analyst capability and knowledge in multiple aspects of professional games, including research, design, development, execution, analysis, and reporting. Through a combination of lectures and exercises, participants will learn the theory behind wargames before diving into research design and execution. Building on Peter Perla’s theory of the “Architect, Artist, and Analyst” model for game designers, the course includes material that covers each style of wargame design. The course culminates in a practicum where participants will be divided into teams to develop and execute their own game for an assigned analytical problem.
MORS has partnered with Virginia Tech to offer this certificate. Participants will receive a number Continuing Education Units (CEUs) upon completion, in accordance with the number of contact hours determined by Virginia Tech.
Objectives:
Our expert instructors will guide participants through the key aspects of wargaming and aid them in creating their own game on the final day of the course. Along the way, participants will learn about the following:
- Defining a wargame
- A brief history of wargames
- Building blocks of game design
- Adjudication
- Strategic gaming
- Wargame graphics
- Game analysis
Overview
The MORS Designing Tactical Games Course is a three-day course that focuses on building tactical games. Tactical games deal with maneuver and combat during individual battles. This requires the game designer to manage large numbers of complex variables in ways that allow the players to make the appropriate Warfighting decisions. Whether this is done using computer or manual techniques, it demands no small degree of simulation—the interaction of forces, the effects of human factors and technology, and the effects of the environment on combat. Any good wargame strives to produce realistic adjudications and outcomes, but the realism of tactical games is tested even more stringently because the players can more easily relate game mechanics and adjudication to their own personal experiences. All of this makes designing tactical games different—and even more challenging—than designing operational or strategic games. This class will examine some of these challenges and possible solutions in both theoretical and practical terms.
Objectives:
Our expert instructors will address tactical games according to the different combat domains: ground, naval, and air. Participants will learn varying aspects of game design and explore future challenges from these perspectives, including but not limited to:
- Designing exploratory games—that is, games to create or test new tactics, weapon systems, or operational concepts
- Ground games:
- How good design must address basic concepts such as mission, time, space, forces, and command relationships
- How to bring all the variables together to create a realistic tactical environment for players to engage in ground warfare
- Different ways of representing ground combat based on a wide range of commercial and professional games
- Air and Naval games:
- Integration of multi-domain operations (MDO) from space to surface into the overall air-battle kill chain
- How do build games that focus on air combat operations, and air combat operations in support of ground forces
- Methods for abstracting and estimating air combat values
- Putting ordnance on not only the target, but the entire kill chain, from identification to battle damage assessment
- Additional topics, depending on participant interest
Overview
Gaming Space Operations is a three-day course focused on how we develop and execute games that involve operations. The course will cover the basics of game design, so that students with no background can understand gaming, but will focus on building games that deal with operations in space. There will be an emphasis on the role that orbital mechanics and space flight considerations play on game design, and students should be prepared to engage with quantitative concepts.
Note that the class will emphasize manual games, with and without digital modeling assistance. This class will be strictly at the UNCLASSIFED/OPEN SOURCE level.
Objectives:
- How to accurately reflect space operations in games focused on other subjects, such as a China warfight.
- The unique requirements for building accurate, but playable, games focused on space systems.
- Building scenarios and games at the intersection of public policy, acquisition, cyber, or strategic defense.
- Representation of space graphically and abstraction of space movement and maneuver operations.
- Building strategic games on the global competition in space.
Prerequisites:
While no prior experience in either gaming or space operations is required for this course, students should have some basic experience with military operations, multi-domain operational concepts, and how conflicts on both the earth and in space might be fought. As in all our courses, the instructors will adapt the class to student’s interests and focus.
The course will be made up of lectures, student exercises, and game encounters where students will play, then redesign, games involving space operations. The course will end with a practical student design problem where students work on one of their own game problems, assisted by the instructors.
