ANALYTICAL USE OF DATA FROM ARMY TRAINING EXERCISES - A CASE-STUDY OFTACTICAL RECONNAISSANCE

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army opened the National Training Center (NTC) as its main U.S. training venue for battalions and brigades. The NTC's primary purpose was training, but because the simulated combat was fairly realistic, many hoped it would provide a sort of laboratory for identifying problems and exploring ways to fix them. This article describes a project that studied tactical reconnaissance at the NTC. The project's substantive purpose was to look for problems in the orga nization, doctrine, equipment, and training for tactical reconnaissanc e, and to suggest remedies. Its methodological purpose was to learn ho w to measure reconnaissance activities and how to use those measuremen ts for analytical purposes, neither of which had been done previously. This article gives background on the NTC and on tactical reconnaissan ce, and then traces the steps of the reconnaissance project. The two m ain methodological issues are how to gather measurements in venues lik e the NTC and what kinds of questions such venues can be used to answe r. As it turns out, high-tech measurements are generally of little use . Low-tech measurements are useful for diagnosis (description) and hyp othesis generation, predictions and causal inferences being fraught wi th hazard. Modest as these uses are, the NTC data are nonetheless high ly valuable.