 The world of the 1960s is a world of ever-increasing scientific and medical progress. But it is also a world with great differences in ideology, great tension. There are many worthy efforts and activities promoting peace and understanding between nations, races, and continents. But there are also many strong, energetic forces arousing fear, unrest, and bitter hatred. The Cold War could turn boiling hot at any moment, with little or no warning. What would a boiling hot war be like five or ten years from now? What decisive new weapons, tactics, or other military concepts could come into the picture by 1968, for instance, or 1976? Just two centuries after Lexington and Concord. Today, as the Cold War grows warmer, it is increasingly important for us to think ahead, plan in advance, keep ourselves well-prepared for any sudden shift to limited or all-out hot war. In an age of push-button attack and retaliation, we cannot afford to be even a few minutes or seconds behind the aggressor. Army presents the Big Picture, an official report produced for the armed forces. History is full of decisive new concepts. Not too long ago, for example, American football was dominated by the famous so-called Flying Wedge. It took steamroller tactics to move the pigskin towards the opposing team's goalposts. Then along came Newt Rockney with his forward pass, and the old emphasis on size and weight was upset, and partially replaced by a new football concept, based on quick thinking, agility, and precision. The same sort of upset took place towards the end of the Middle Ages at the Battle of Agincourt, a little village in northern France. There, on a muddy day in late October, a good-sized army of heavily armored knights and warriors, representing the cream of the French nobility, was nearly wiped off the map by a comparatively small number of invading Englishmen. Two brand-new military concepts tipped the scales in England's favor. One of these was the idea of substituting light, flexible chain mail in place of the traditional unwieldy suit of armor. The other concept took the English hunting ball and turned it into a military weapon. During the Second World War, a whole series of new military concepts, like Blitzkrieg tactics, and paratroop invasions upset a rather misplaced trust in trenches and fixed fortifications which had held over from World War I. In each of these classic examples, old outmoded principles and practices were disrupted and routed by decisive new concepts. The side which came out on top was the side which prepared for the present and the future, not the past. Several years ago, therefore, our Continental Army Command, Conarch, established the Combat Development Section at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The mission of combat development is to help the Department of the Army determine the best possible doctrine, organization, and equipment for tomorrow's army. This means striking out into unknown territory with brilliance, courage, and imagination. It means fostering and developing all sorts of new military concepts, examining them in an accurate, objective manner, judging their fitness, and applying this judgment towards the development of an efficient, up-to-date fighting machine that will always be ready for trouble at a moment's notice. In its initial phase, combat developments tended to emphasize materiel. For hundreds of years, nearly every important new military maneuver or organization had come about as the result of some fairly recent weapon or other piece of army equipment. This was true of the bow and arrow at Agincourt, the tank in the First World War, and the paratroopers in the Second, to mention just a few examples. As their program got underway, however, the various agencies involved began to feel more and more that developing tactics to fit equipment was less than half the picture. In most cases, tactics and techniques should determine weapons and vehicles rather than the other way around. That it would be generally wiser to soft-pedal the development of new material until we had decided what we were going to use it for, until we had asked ourselves what jobs we wanted done, what missions we wanted carried out. This change of emphasis created quite a few problems. When we are evaluating equipment, it is quite easy to be both accurate and objective. It is quite easy to compare the relative speed of two aircraft, or of two projectiles, or accuracy of two pieces of artillery. Because these differences can be seen by the naked eye, measured in fractions of meters, or timed in split seconds. When, however, we try to evaluate military tactics, techniques, and organizations, a great many rather difficult questions arise. How, for instance, can we judge a tactical concept without testing it in actual combat? How can we tell whether the best way for a low-flying observation plane to avoid small arms fire is to speed along at a straight level, or whether it should slow down a bit and follow the contours of the hills and valleys? How can we determine whether a mobile platoon on a particular mission should have four personnel carriers, or just two carriers, plus a tank and a reconnaissance jeep? And how can we decide whether an automatic foxhole digger is an asset because it speeds things up, or a liability because it is apt to draw the enemy's attention with its noise? Above all, how can we be truly objective when we cannot use measuring rods and stopwatches when you cannot count casualties? Faced with questions like these, the commanding general, U.S. Connarch, realized that a setup would have to be created where operational military concepts for the future could be evaluated under conditions just short of actual war. Where great masses of men and materiel could perform carefully thought-out, carefully rehearsed maneuvers, not for the purposes of training the men, but instead for the purpose of testing and judging what they were doing. To make these evaluations absolutely valid and objective, they would have to be scientific and mechanical rather than personal. As a solution, Connarch decided to adopt and apply some of the latest principles of pure, impartial scientific research. For a laboratory, they would need a varied landscape with all the terrain features which the concepts they wished to test might encounter anywhere in the world, hills, mountains, and flat plains, forests, scrub, and open country. Above all, they would need plenty of space. After searching all over the United States for a piece of terrain with all these necessary features, Connarch finally selected the State of California. There, in 1956, they founded the Combat Development Experimentation Center, or CDEC. CDEC, as it is more popularly known, CDEC's mission is to serve as a field laboratory for the evaluation by objective experimentation of those concepts of organization and operations as may be directed by Headquarters United States Continental Army Command. CDEC has two centers in California, an administrative and scientific headquarters at Fort Ord near Monterey, and a huge 250,000-acre field laboratory called the Hunter-Ligit Military Reservation about 90 miles to the south. Twice each year, in the spring and the fall, a three-month series of controlled experiments takes place at Hunter-Ligit involving thousands of men and close to a thousand major items of military equipment. In most of these experiments, new concepts are tested by friendly troops against an aggressor force employing all the tricks that our military intelligence believes a potential enemy may be using, five or ten years in the future. A recent three-month series was built around the concepts for several possible military organizations for tomorrow's army. These organizations are all designed to operate on the battlefields of the future where we must have a more mobile army capable of rapid dispersal and where we will present only very transitory, very elusive nuclear targets. In order to make certain that experiments are conducted and evaluated in a strictly scientific manner, CDEC has more than 30 outstanding scientists under permanent contract with the Stanford Research Institute of Menlo Park, California. The effective cooperation between military personnel and these experts from all branches of the sciences is one of the most gratifying features of CDEC. When CDEC receives the project directive for a future experiment, the directive is assigned to a project team composed of scientists and permanently assigned officers. The team's mission is to translate the concept into a field experiment that will disclose under scientific control and analysis both its positive and its negative qualities. The military side of the team puts the concept into logical combat form and establishes whatever project requirements are necessary for supplies, equipment, transport, personnel, and training. The scientific side with the help of the military organizes the experiment so that the concept can be tested and judged for significant qualities such as its ability to move whenever necessary, its ability to maintain control, its ability to acquire intelligence about the opposing side, its ability to maintain adequate and continued contact with supply sources, its degree of exposure to attack or injury, and its destructive force. In each experiment, the concept, the thing being tested, is exposed to a series of varying conditions or circumstances. This is the old research principle of testing a constant against a series of variables. To give you a better idea of what we mean, let's take two very simple but different concepts about a projected mobile platoon. One concept says that the platoon should have four personnel carriers. The other says it should have just two personnel carriers, plus a tank and a reconnaissance jeep. To evaluate these two concepts and determine which of them is better and under what circumstances, each in turn will be tested and observed on flat terrain, in wooded terrain, and in mountainous country. It will also be tested and observed in attack situations and defense situations, daytime and in nighttime, in a nuclear environment and a non-nuclear environment. In each experiment, the concept is our constant and the situations are our variables. When a concept has been organized in this manner, each detail of the future experiment that will disclose its strengths and its weaknesses is written into what SEDEC calls a scenario. So much care, consideration and planning go into the scenario that it takes the project team about 12 months, one full year to finish this stage of their work, about four times as long as the experiment itself at Hunter Liggett. The SEDEC headquarters there is built around a beautiful Spanish type Hacienda, relic of the days when this entire region was a multimillionaire's private hunting reserve. During each three month series there is an encampment of troops in one area who represent our side in the experiments, so-called friendly troops. These men are permanently attached to SEDEC and between each spring and fall series are stationed at Fort Ord where they receive very careful, very rigorous training for the next session. Several miles away is another encampment of troops, the aggressors. Between sessions these men advised by liaison officers from the aggressor center at Fort Riley, Kansas, receive equally careful rigorous training in the latest tactics and techniques of potential enemies. Both sides have plenty of spirit and determination, plenty of what is known as a spree decor. In other words, they play for keeps. The tactics, techniques and organizations used in the SEDEC field experiments are designed for a period several years from now, the weapons, vehicles and other equipment they use are assumed to represent that period. The official word for this pretense is simulation. Harmless smoke bomb can simulate a nuclear hit and a statistical chart can then tell us within what radius all operations would be knocked out. A current or slightly out of date vehicle can maneuver in a prescribed way and thereby simulate a tank of the future which so far is only in the planning stage. A simulated weapon of the future can pretend to fire at an aggressor target and special SEDEC hit and kill data cards can tell us what certain projected artillery pieces would accomplish in say the year 1975. These data cards are just one of the devices which the scientists connected with SEDEC can give us. The hidden numbers under the squares vary from card to card but taken together they represent an accurate estimate of the fire power and precision of possible weapons which we can adopt and produce if we want them or abandon if we don't want them thereby saving Uncle Sam millions of dollars. This 4th of July skyrocket can simulate a tank missile of 1970. This infrared transmitter mounted coaxially on the tube of a direct fire weapon and this infrared receiver mounted on a tank can tell us whether or not the tank has been hit by the weapon. Whether or not it is a casualty and so it goes. As a result of nuclear weapons warfare of the future will be carried out by small widely dispersed and separated units trying to keep out of sight for in tomorrow's combat if you can be seen you're probably dead. This very unphotogenic and unvisual nature of future warfare makes it difficult for SEDEC evaluators to visually observe the various experiments that are being carried out even from low elevations this they do of course but in addition to this rather personal subjective evaluation the staff and scientists at SEDEC have perfected another type of observing which is much more objective scientific and controlled. To begin with the entire 250,000 acres of military reservation have been divided into 500 meter squares. In the exact center of each square there is a large marker identified by alphabet coordinates. SEDEC has also placed smaller markers with additional color codes at 100 meter intervals. This means that individuals vehicles or units anywhere on Hunter Liggett terrain can always be located within 50 meters. In addition to this rather unusual and very effective system of marking location SEDEC has a special very important third group of military personnel at Hunter Liggett the field umpires and controllers. The field umpires identified by special headbands are neither part of the friendly troops nor part of the aggressor forces but they monitor both sides while the experiments are being run. At regular pre-arranged intervals they report by walkie-talkie over a special network to the controllers who occupy one of SEDEC's nerve centers the experimentation control center near headquarters. During every experiment each individual squad each tank, each personnel carrier has one of these field umpires who moves along with the unit. It also has a controller seated at his desk in the experimentation control center. In the main room at the control center or ECC each controller is connected with the field operations by a separate ultra high frequency channel. In this case 15 controllers are in contact with the friendly troops and 15 with the aggressor forces. The front of the main room is dominated by a large situation display map backed by aluminum which shows the exact location of each unit in the field as it advances holds its position or retreats. Every five minutes or so each field umpire notes his unit's new location and reports this information by walkie-talkie. His signal is picked up by Sight Alpha a powerful relay station which has been installed on one of the highest peaks in the area. At Sight Alpha the umpire's voice is converted to microwave and beams several miles to the control center down in the San Antonio Valley. At the ECC the incoming microwave is changed back to voice transferred to the unit controller whose assistant records the new location. The controller then switches his turret from radio to telephone and then relays the location coordinates to a special team who sit right behind the big situation display map up in front of the main room. The rear surface of this map is marked by lettered squares which correspond to those out in front. By changing the position of one of these small magnets the plotter is able to move the unit symbol to its new location on the map. As casualties occur in the field these are also radioed in to the ECC. If the casualty report comes from an aggressor umpire it is relayed to a control console in front of the aggressor section in the main room and transferred to personnel or vehicle casualty status boards located to the right of the situation display map. On the other side of the main room a similar arrangement exists for the friendly units. Each pair of status boards is separated by a large square of ground glass. When simulated artillery action is part of an experiment helpful information from the field can be recorded on plastic slides and projected on to this screen. In addition to other duties each controller at the ECC makes a personal record of all pertinent data concerning his particular unit. At the end of each week these unit records are collected and sent to Fort Ord. At Fort Ord these records are broken down and compiled into special reports and statistics and further reduced to IBM punched cards. It takes about 600,000 of these cards and perhaps a million photographs to register a three month series of experiments. At periodic intervals these cards are sent to the Stanford Research Institute for further analysis on the automatic data processing computers. When the Univac tape and the photographs and the punched cards come back once again to Fort Ord each project team spends a final few months studying them evaluating the concept and organizing their reactions, their conclusions and their recommendations into a final report which is sent back to Fort Monroe, Virginia. On the basis of these reports Connark will be able to decide years before they are needed whether or not a projected military organization is a valid concept. Whether or not the mobile platoon should have four personnel carriers and whether or not the high speed and trenching machine is really practical during combat. We all hope and trust that there will be no boiling hot war in 1968 or 1976 or any other year in the future. One of the surest ways to prevent this war is to prepare for all its possibilities as we are preparing through military and scientific activities like CDEC because if we are indeed prepared, if we look ahead rather than behind if we keep pace with tomorrow, no potential enemy will underestimate us No potential aggressor will miscalculate No potential troublemaker will dare strike The big picture is an official report for the armed forces and the American people Produced by the Army Pictorial Center presented by the Department of the Army in cooperation with this station