Assessing Military Benefits of S&T Investmnts in Micro Autonomous Systems Utilizing A Gedanken Experiment

In a Defense and Technology Paper (DTP) entitled "A Methodology for Assessing the Military Benefits of Science and Technology Investments,"1 the National Defense University (NDU) Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) presented a variety of approaches for deriving the return on investment - in terms of warfighting capabilities - for Army science and technology (S&T) efforts. As a follow-up to the methodology study that generated the DTP, the CTNSP wished to demonstrate parts of the methodology in the evaluation of an actual Army S&T effort. The Army Research Laboratory's (ARL's) Micro-Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA)2 program was chosen to demonstrate the utility of the methodology because it offers significant future capabilities for our Army, provides a set of very robust present-day technical challenges, and offers a significant assessment challenge since it is focused on basic research.