Generating Explainable Military Courses of Action

Course Of Action (COA) generation is an important step in the military decision making process. In land operations it is a manual, creative process throughout which a commander and his staff take many factors into account, such as mission, terrain and weather, doctrine, threat capabilities and own capabilities. Disadvantages of this manual process are the inability of taking into account too many factors, the number of staff involved and the difficulty in evaluating COAs. New (AI-based) technologies can overcome these disadvantages and when implemented could serve as Tactical Decision Aids. This paper presents the results of research in which a step towards an automated tactical decision support tool for land operations was made. For a single SEIZE task at company level, based on doctrinal templates, COAs are selected and optimized using Genetic Algorithms based on simulated effects. An initial step in elucidating the generated COAs is undertaken by linking individual outcomes of simulation runs during the (GA) optimization process to tactical features of the terrain.¹¹This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-205-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Koblenz, Germany, 23–24 April 2024.