Evaluating digital targeting in a joint fires experiment

Abstract

The Coalition Attack Guidance Experiment (CAGE) aims to assess potential joint fires capabilities and operational impacts, which can be effective to meet challenges from new and evolving threats. An important objective is digital targeting focusing on target development and timely prosecution. The need to coordinate geographically distributed assets and personnel throughout a theatre of combat is constantly in tension with the need to prosecute quickly. This study provides an empirical comparison of digital targeting using baseline and potential future Command and Control (C2) systems as two experimental conditions. While CAGE IIIA demonstrated the benefits of a coalition human-in-the-loop experiment across multiple sites, we learned valuable lessons to improve this scientific endeavour. Technical failures and confounding factors have threatened the validity of this complex experiment, inevitably weakening our understanding of potential capabilities. For future work, we identify the need to consider the human dimension and extant processes for effective system integration.