Enabling DoD's Test Ranges and Infrastructure to Meet Threats and Operational Needs in the 21st Century: Unclassified Summary (2022)
Chapter: Appendix A: Statement of Task
A
Statement of Task
The Department of Defense operates several ranges across all service branches to test the effectiveness of military systems in the land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace domains. These ranges and infrastructure represent a critical part of the DoD acquisition and systems development process.
The DoD’s Office of Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) has asked the Board on Anny Research and Development to assess how effectively these ranges fulfill DOT&E’s mission to determine operational effectiveness and lethality of systems currently under development. This study will specifically evaluate whether these ranges are prepared to simulate threats, countermeasures, and operations against near-peer adversaries.
NASEM will convene an ad hoc committee to assess the operational suitability of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) ranges, infrastructures, and tools used for the test and evaluation (T&E) of military systems’ operational effectiveness, suitability, survivability, and lethality across all domains (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace).
Specifically, the committee will:
- Assess the aggregate suitability of ranges to incorporate Scientific and Technical Intelligence (S&TI) for threat and threat countermeasure replication, their capacity for realistic weapons testing and evaluation, and their autonomous testing capabilities.
- Assess the adequacy of ranges, infrastructure, and tools, on land, at sea, in the air, in space and in cyberspace, to accommodate future technologies anticipated to arrive between now and 2035. These technologies include, but are not necessarily limited to: Directed energy, hypersonic systems, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, space systems and threats, 6th generation aircraft, advanced acoustic and non-acoustic technologies for undersea warfare, and advanced active electronic warfare/cyber capabilities.
- Evaluate a cross-section of ranges across the domains to assess their aggregate ability to simulate, test, and evaluate threats and countermeasures (through an appropriate combination of modeling & simulation, experiment, and physical testing) that sufficiently represents adversary capabilities.
- For each area discussed above, the committee will recommend how the DoD can address, and/or mitigate, any existing or anticipated deficiencies.
