Empowering Data-Driven Combat Strategies with High Confidence

“The most powerful weapon in chess is to have the next move,” said 1950s’ world chess champion David Bronstein.

The same could be said of warfare, where the ability to anticipate a vast assortment of possible moves—and strategize accordingly—can mean the difference between victory or defeat. 

What if you could add new pieces and attack rules, giving the board altered shape with added dimensions? What if you could simulate and analyze thousands of potential moves within minutes to affect the game’s outcome? 

The challenge: “Our sponsor needed a tool with a high degree of rigor to model and analyze capabilities—some that don’t yet exist—and understand how they might work together under operational conditions not yet realized,” says David Farrell, an engineer in MITRE’s National Security Sector.

The solution: the Stochastic Model for Analyzing Combat Strategies, also called SMACS. The framework enables military planners to simulate combat strategies under dynamic circumstances, from supply-chain disruptions to enemy cyber-attacks and beyond.

“As we advance the design of joint warfighting for the future, we need cutting-edge analytical tools to enhance decision-making,” says Adria Markowski, Ph.D., of the Joint Staff J7. “SMACS allows us to rapidly analyze courses of action, assess risks, and generate data-driven recommendations to optimize mission outcomes.”

From Random Guesses to Real-World Strategy

The U.S. military already uses modeling and simulation to improve the odds in combat. Yet modeling tools typically demand precise input, and when conditions change, outcomes change.

SMACS helps by generating the most-probable outcomes, based on limited and fluctuating information.

“The framework allows them to plug in a multitude of guesses and test hypotheses, not necessarily to find a specific answer, but to determine the bounds an answer needs to fall within,” Farrell says.

To ensure its rigor, SMACS underwent stress-testing through sensitivity analyses and peer reviews, using a range of expert-developed operational scenarios and threat data. It demonstrated stable behavior and use in early-stage concept development across diverse conditions. Ongoing validation will further strengthen its reliability.

The technology, which MITRE transferred to the Joint Staff J7 sponsor in April, is becoming a game-changer for refining future warfighting concepts, capabilities, and tactics.

How Does SMACS Work?

Using game theory—a computational technique with random sampling—the tool allows decision-makers to see and respond to various “plays.” It simulates interactions between aggressor and defender, representing real-world and future military assets within a combat scenario. Planners can then evaluate possible outcomes and predict probable outcomes.

“An adversary could initiate a kinetic attack, such as employing drones to target a command-and-control unit,” explains MITRE’s Adam Patterson, one of SMACS developers. “Or the threat might be non-kinetic, like jamming an opponent’s communications.”

Regardless of the method, the aggressor aims to disrupt and degrade the defender’s ability to operate effectively. Defenders counterattack to protect their high-value assets (think: a future air platform deploying to protect an air defense system). As each side makes their “play” and battlefield conditions shift, SMACS updates the operational picture for the next engagement.

Future combat strategies that would take six months to develop manually can be generated by SMACS in a few weeks. Rather than reacting to changing conditions, planners can turn to the concept development cycle more confidently and efficiently to drive warfighting enhancements.

“Checkmate” in Fewer, Less-Costly Moves

To create SMACS, MITRE’s multidisciplinary team combined deep technical expertise with broad operational experience. Our role as the not-for-profit operator of the federally funded R&D center for national security ensured a development approach informed by our long-term sponsor relationship and understanding of their mission.

Originally designed in simple Excel format, SMACS evolved along with the sponsor’s needs. In collaboration with Joint Staff personnel, our engineers ultimately delivered a sophisticated code-based tool for operational planning across domains—land, air, sea, space, and cyber.

“The tool initially began as a decision tree, and now we’re looking at a network of things happening simultaneously in different spaces,” explains Suzanne DeLong, who co-led the development team with Farrell.

SMACS demonstrated impact in use cases including joint suppression of enemy air defense, missiles, sensors, and more. The technology’s transfer to the government empowers them to independently explore new use cases and further enhance their analysis processes.

Beyond U.S. national security applications, the MITRE team is exploring the tool’s potential use for combined operations with multinational partners. SMACS could also prove impactful for planning response to non-human “aggressors,” like forest fires.

The bottom line: decision-makers can expend fewer resources to get a faster, broader, deeper look at how strategies and future operational concepts might play out across an assortment of scenarios.

“I’m excited to see how we can use the tool to help our sponsors see things in a different way and offer a wide-ranging set of options to consider,” DeLong says.