A Multithreaded Missions And Means Framework (MMF) Concept Report

This report addresses the problem of identifying critical knowledge elements that are essential to decision making and that impact mission outcome. All too often, these knowledge elements and their criticality to mission outcome are discovered after some catastrophic event, where (in hindsight) the Army discovers that if it only knew this or that, a decision maker would have had the information to take an appropriate course of action to mitigate or prevent mission failure. To facilitate a solution to this problem, the military Missions and Means Framework was extended from its original single-threaded structure (addressing combat operations) to a multithreaded/multiple-domain structure (addressing logistics, transportation, engineering, and intelligence in conjunction with combat operations). Finally, the operational utility of this extended multithreaded methodology is demonstrated via a notional two-threaded combat operations/logistics mission simulation using an agent-based modeling and simulation platform. The original document contains color images.