Environmental factors in amphibious operations

This article provides an overview of an effort to quantify the impact of environmental factors on amphibious operations. Two primary objectives of the analysis are summarized: (i) Develop a methodology to rank-order environmental factors in proportion to their impact on warfare effectiveness; (ii) Demonstrate the operational impact of the environment using methods and measures employed in high-level studies as part of the Navy assessment and budgeting process. A decision-theoretic methodology was developed to rank-order a complete spectrum of 36 environmental factors. The study determined that factors such as visibility and terrain that impact fundamental capabilities such as sensing, mobility, and targeting, would top the list in most scenarios. The ranking of individual factors within those and other broad categories is sensitive to scenario, season, and to the anticipated concept of force employment. The operational analysis demonstrated how adverse conditions could defeat a mission plan and used a high-level measure of effectiveness to indicate the resulting impact on mission success. The rank-ordering methodology provides a big-picture operational perspective to researchers in environmental science, modeling, and data collection. The high-level impact analysis puts environmental research and products on the same footing as traditional research, development, and procurement of combat systems from the perspective of program planners and decision-makers. Such analysis highlights the extent to which operational assessment analysis depends on the environmental context and allows environmental programs and products to be traded off against sensors, weapons, and platforms. These methodologies could be adapted to assess environmental impacts on additional naval warfare missions and even, joint warfare operations.