Weaponeering for the Warfighter

Morris R. Driels has published three editions of his textbook Weaponeering, which primarily serve civilians working in an R&D capacity for Departments of Defense or military services who require a relatively deep understanding of the mathematics and physics driving the underlying methods.

This new book targets a second audience of "warfighters." They are usually military personnel who are involved with the execution of military operations, including the planning of offensive strikes against enemy forces. Although tools such as the Joint Weaponeering System (JWS) are available to plan such attacks, and training is provided for using the tools correctly, there is little explanation giving the warfighter an understanding of what lies behind programs such as JWS. Experience has shown warfighters desire to understand more than just the "buttonology" of using weaponeering tools since this does not provide background information on the assumptions, limitations, and reliability of the results they produce. There are many examples of trying to improve the probability of damage to the second decimal place when, if the assumptions behind the result were understood, the futility of doing this would become obvious.

This book therefore uses much of the knowledge and material utilized in the author's previous texts, but with an emphasis on breadth rather than depth. In addition, the mathematical validation of many of the methods is deemphasized and replaced with more real-world topics and examples to put the underlying methods in the context of how they are applied, rather than how they are developed. The need remains to explain some concepts using an approach that still involves some mathematics, physics and statistics, however this has been simplified as much as possible to the extent it may be ignored by the casual reader, as long as they are willing to accept the results that are produced.

After presenting chapters on those topics needed to estimate the damage to a target using conventional weapons, an unclassified computer program is described that implements most of the methods outlined in the book. This is supplemented by a database approved by the Joint Technical Coordinating Group for Munitions Effectiveness (JTCG/ME) for educational purposes so that several case studies of realistic attacks can be evaluated. Although weaponeers in the U.S. and selected coalition partners with the appropriate security clearances can obtain copies of the JWS program and therefore have access to the classified weapon and target vulnerability data, that option will not be available to others. To remedy this to the extent possible, examples are presented indicating how this data may be estimated using open-source material.