Military Adaptive Planning

When planning a military operations, today’s complex military environments require robust plans that can dynamically adjust as situations change. Cougaar Software, Inc.’s (CSI’s) adaptive planning systems enable unparalleled collaboration and communication between echelons and across traditional stovepipes.

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Military strategist Helmuth von Moltke

The 2009 DoD C2 Implementation Plan asserted, “The accelerated pace and complexity of military operations requires commanders to have the ability to respond quickly to dynamic threats and challenges. The fluid and uncertain international situation requires a transformed planning and execution approach across the DoD, which quickly generates and/or updates detailed contingency plans containing multiple options that can be readily adapted to the given circumstances and then rapidly transitioned to execution.”

The current mission planning process requires manual production of monolithic plans and orders, using a slow sequential production process. This process cannot possibly leverage the volumes of data available via the rich net-centric environment in modern command centers, and the resulting orders cannot sufficiently respond to the dynamics of a modern battlespace situation

The Living Plan

Adaptive Planning and Execution (APEX) allows users to define and manage plans so that they will continue to be effective battle management tools throughout the mission. CSI’s Adaptive Planning (AP) Framework provides a suite of planning and decision support tools integrated with a secure distributed infrastructure that implements the “Living Plan” concept defined by the DoD Adaptive Planning Roadmap II. The goal of APEX is to align and synchronize the adaptive planning process and the resulting “Living Plan” with other functional activities, such as intelligence, logistics, force management, and force employment. CSI’s AP Framework capabilities include:

  • Distributed collaborative planning
  • Semantically-rich plan representation that is understandable by humans and the system that links the plan content to the forces, resources, timing, geographical environment and assumptions defined for the mission.
  • Automated calculation of logistics requirements and development of logistics support
  • Execution monitoring of tasks and plan execution progress
  • Alerts to appropriate command staff of execution status and significant conditions.

First Operational APEX Capability

CSI’s AP Framework is the first operational APEX capability with an implementation of the Living Plan concept. Leveraging intelligent software agents to implement Sense & Respond (S&R) operational concepts, the AP Framework is the core “engine” driving the Marine Corps Adaptive Planning (MCAP) capability, and can be tailored to a specific domain based on the participating operational forces, their capabilities and resources, and the systems of record with which it is to be integrated.

For an example of an Adaptive Planning application, please explore CSI’s MCAP capability. Learn more