General document | ForceViewer: A Starting Point Force Tool

ABSTRACT 

This document outlines the work done in developing ForceViewer, a tool that assists in producing a Starting Point Force. The document outlines the requirements for the tool, the tool itself and the structure of its code. ForceViewer was developed for the Capability Needs Analysis Directorate in Capability Development Group. The prototype tool graphically shows the Starting Point Force in any chosen year. The tool allows for interactive changes to the force and displays the impact on the overall capability. The force is composed of the current assets, the Defence Capability Plan projects and any interim endorsed capability additions. The purpose of the tool is to quickly determine and display the list of all major elements of the force structure in a chosen year. This Starting Point Force can then be given to Defence organisations such as Military Strategy and the Force Structure Review team for further analysis.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Capability Needs Analysis Directorate within Capability Development Group (CDG) is tasked to assemble the list of capabilities forming the Starting Point Force (SPF). This SPF is used by a number of organisations within Defence and in particular by the Force Structure Review (FSR) team. The SPF is usually assembled using Microsoft Word and Excel to store and derive which capability elements would be available in a given year. These tools however, are not very flexible in viewing the time dependence of the capabilities.

The need for a better tool that delivers the SPF was identified by Joint Operations Division, Joint Decisions Support Centre (JDSC) task. This was translated into a prototype called ForceViewer, and is the subject of this document.

ForceViewer graphically shows the SPF in any chosen year. The main use of the tool is to drag a time slider bar to the desired year and look at those capabilities present (left) in That year. The tool allows for interactive changes to the force and displays their impact on the overall capability. The force is composed of the current assets, the Defence Capability Plan projects and any interim endorsed capability additions. Further, ForceViewer allows links to be defined between capability elements by dragging the mouse from one element to another. The view of the links can also be filtered to show only the chosen types.

The discriminating data for the tool consists mainly of time, such as in-service and planned withdrawal dates, that determine when a capability element is available. In addition to the time data the tool can also incorporate the contributions of each major asset to various capability partitioning schemes, such as the Capability Tasks Effects (CTE) and the Joint Capability Areas (JCA). The data is sourced from the Key Defence Asset Review [1], the Defence Capability Plan [2] and the Defence White Paper [3]. ForceViewer reads and writes its data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

ForceViewer has a main view that shows all capability elements in a given year grouped by service. A capability element is represented by a coloured rectangle with an icon at its centre. The rectangle also shows the number of capability elements in the chosen year. Other views of the data include a Gantt chart view showing when capability elements are present and a number of line charts that display the number of capability elements as a function of time. The different views can be filtered to present only those elements of interest, for example, displaying all capability elements belonging to a chosen Joint Capability Areas.

The lessons learnt by the JDSC in developing ForceViewer (in partnership with CDG), provide valuable information on how to develop an idea into a prototype tool. Similarly, CDG awareness in shaping the development of support tools, and the data required for it, increased as a result of this work. ForceViewer has proved useful, and a number of future improvements have been identified.