High-Level Methodologies to Evaluate Naval Task Groups

Defense organizations within many nations (e.g., United States and Canada), use capability-based planning (CBP) to guide their force development processes. A key element of the CBP process is testing current and proposed capabilities against force planning scenarios, particularly for asset evaluation. This analysis involves a wide range of capabilities, and thus is a multicriteria problem. Comparison of alternatives using multiple criteria is challenging, and often is assisted by aggregation techniques. Set in a naval context, this paper presents three high-level capability aggregation techniques: the vector method, star plot method, and wedge method. Each method aggregates naval task group capabilities, with respect to a scenario, into three quantifiable measures: effectiveness, unmatched, and unused. As with numerous techniques, the effectiveness gauges the ability of a task group to meet a set of scenario requirements. The unmatched and unused measures yield insight into capability gaps, which is an important aspect of CBP. The unmatched metric measures scenario requirements that are not provided by a task group and the unused metric measures task group capabilities that are not required by a scenario. An application of the methods is presented, including a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this work, it is concluded that the vector method is the best of the three presented.