Developing tactics using low cost, accessible simulations

The Royal Navy´s Maritime Warfare Centre (MWC) is responsible to the UK Commander-in-Chief Fleet (CinCFleet) and was formed with the purpose of developing operational tactics and procedures to optimize the capability of the Fleet´s platforms, sensors and weapon systems. Evaluating tactics at sea requires a considerable amount of forward planning and ties up valuable and expensive assets. It is therefore important that the candidate tactics must be developed to a sufficient level of maturity on-shore. This is done through a combination of individual brainpower, paper studies and computer simulation. The computer simulation must be inexpensive, totally flexible, sufficiently accurate, reliable and above all easily available to, and usable by, the individual tactical desk officers. Any simulations developed need to be easily adaptable. Tactical development is not a formally structured process; software development is not easy when there are no formal requirements. The MWC have investigated using the Spreadsheet Excel to form the basis of such simulations. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, in creating simulations that can be used for developing tactics that have the necessary degree of flexibility, integrity and usability. A specific example of an application to a particular problem will be illustrated