Emergent behavior in the battle management system

ABSTRACT

Many countries including Ukraine use battle management systems (BMS) like Delta that enable command to share situation awareness information; this study focuses on the distribution of information across a warfighting network. Similar to natural systems, where autonomous agents, such as ants and bees, follow a set of simple rules, a BMS is a network of bases and electronic warfighting platforms that have military assets as agents within the network, guided by the defense doctrine. The rationale for the workability of such a system is based on each subsystem being reliable when multiple subsystems interact. However, the potential permutations and combinations of interactions can cause unpredictable negative or positive feedback loops, resulting in unpredictable and unwanted outcomes. The results of emergent behavior are unexpected and sometimes unwanted in areas such as intelligence, and wireless networks. Understanding emergent behavior is imperative in understanding complex engineering systems, and to present new insights, and take practical steps toward improving complex systems design and analysis. This paper presents the BMS and networks with examples of user-defined system integration of the network soldier concept. We believe that Ukrainian and other armies can directly benefit from utilising meta cybernetics, meta metasystem model analysis to control emergence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the University of Southern Queensland.