A passage from a FM post last week prompted some thinking:

“It is disturbing that NFL teams routinely spend more effort reviewing films of their games than the US Army appears to have done reviewing the the Battle of Mogadishu (until Bowden published his book).”

An intriguing but spurious analogy. Football teams benefit from detailed video footage (accessible through databases that they have developed at significant cost), a constrained environment (including significant time constraints) and external rule enforcement. Results of these differences include the ability to predict future environments with greater confidence and the ability to train to those forecast environments. NFL teams benefit from a regular schedule of engagements (they don’t have to stay suited up, ready to play an opponent at a moment’s notice) against known opponents (after game-planning for the Ravens, the Patriots don’t have to worry about suddenly having to play the Colts). Were the NFL a truly unconstrained competitive environment (i.e. war), these are some of the first assumptions an adversary would look to exploit (as well as gaining access to other teams’ playbooks, jamming or intercepting in-game communications, bribing referees, …). [1]

Over the past two decades, sports teams have adopted practices from operations research to improve operations from personnel management to in-game tactical decision support. [2] Supporting this growing analytic edifice is a foundation of IT infrastructure that compiles and manages the raw data. Lay readers may not appreciate at first just how critical this foundation is, or how expensive it is to maintain. The Boston Globe recently offered a window into the manpower and technology required to do this in the NBA. The Red Sox and the Patriots have invested in similar capabilities but are notoriously tight-lipped about them (an indication of the perceived competitive advantage offered by such capabilities). [3] Michael Lewis’ Moneyball focuses on how better metrics can translate into a competitive advantage, but doesn’t focus in the data requirements (or the IT infrastructure) that support the process.

When one attempts to apply this model to military planning, the challenge of cataloging every component of a 48 minute basketball game appear trivial. The National Training Center, for example, can catalogue every shot fired and the position of every vehicle, but this is in a constrained training environment.

Another perspective on the challenge is that military operations research and systems analysts (ORSAs - FA 49s in Army parlance) spend much of their time gathering the data to answer commander’s questions. Operations research analysts supporting sports teams, in contrast, are able to devote much of their time running more extended analyses using the already gathered data.

[1] W. P. Kinsella wrote a short story that beautifully portrays this dynamic in the context of a barnstorming pitcher who specialized in pitching from a mound 61′ from home plate (instead of the standard 60′ 6″).

[2] I’ve made the (perhaps erronious) assumption in past posts that my readers are already familiar with operations research (OR) and systems analysis. While it clearly has a relationship with ideas of scientific managment (dating back to the late 19th Century), OR as a discipline grew out of work done by engineers, physicists and mathematicians during WWII. It focuses on using quantitative models to optimize operations and improve decision-making. Classic analytic techniques in it’s toolbox include linear and integer programming, queuing theory, markov chains, and bayesian networks. Systems analysis grew out of OR, looking to make similar progress on less structured problems. My readership will probably be most interested in the applications of OR and systems analysis to military affairs.

[3] For the Red Sox, Mind Game is the best source I know. For the Patriots, Patriot Reign has some intriguing nuggets. In both cases, you need to read between the lines. I’ve done some research in this area, if anyone is particularly interested.