Area of Interest: OSW Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) Modeling and Simulation

What the buyer is asking for

The Department of War (DOW) Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) supports the Office of the Secretary of War (OSW). The Director of CAPE is the principal staff assistant to the Secretary of War for Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation. In fulfilling this role, the Director of CAPE provides independent, non-advocate, and data-driven analytical evaluations directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of War regarding defense program investments, major force structure posture, and strategic resourcing trade-offs. The Director’s principal responsibilities include: Analyze and evaluate plans, programs, and budgets in relation to U.S. defense objectives, projected threats, allied contributions, estimated costs, and resource constraints. Review, analyze, and evaluate programs, including classified programs, for executing approved policies. Provide leadership in developing and promoting improved analytical tools and methods for analyzing national security planning and the allocation of resources. Ensure that the costs of DoW programs, including classified programs, are presented accurately and completely. Assess effects of DoW spending on the U.S. economy and evaluate alternative policies to ensure that DoW programs can be implemented efficiently. Currently, CAPE’s campaign- and mission-level Modeling and Simulation (M&S) relies on heavy, time-intensive physics engines (e.g., AFSIM) that execute discrete, bespoke combat runs. While highly detailed, these simulation approaches are too slow, computationally expensive, and inflexible to support executive-level sensitivity sweeps across multi-dimensional threat environments and Department warfighting capabilities. CAPE’s current environment leverages HPC resources that provide 1.5 terabytes (TB) of usable memory and 2,000 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores with no wall clock time restraints. On average, individual simulation execution via AFSIM requires 1 hour of real time to complete and 20 gigabytes (GB) of accessible RAM. This constraint, coupled with sharp disparities in compute architecture, hardware availability, and security accreditation across existing CAPE enclaves restrict analysts to limited, manual workflows while preventing the execution of high-throughput, compute-intensive campaign analytics. CAPE is seeking innovative solutions to establish a next-generation modeling architecture, replacing its legacy M&S infrastructure. To dramatically compress the cycle time between defense budget queries and statistically defensible warfighting insights, the target environment must integrate three interdependent functional layers: (1) A high-performance simulation execution layer to execute large numbers of model (e.g., AFSIM) runs to span the parameter space. Runs in this layer are computationally intensive and resource demanding but will be executed infrequently and systematically using advanced Design of Experiments techniques. (2) A machine-learned surrogate emulation layer to train ultra-fast emulator models from simulation results and detect out-of-sample queries. While the government plans to develop and calibrate these surrogate emulators and analytical models in-house, the commercial solution must provide the extensible data staging, pipeline integration, and execution framework to ingest batch simulation results and host these government-developed models. (3) An intuitive self-service quantitative analysis layer housing pre-built methods for sensitivity analysis, marginal gain estimates, etc., and tools for custom analysis (e.g., tradespace decisions between range, speed, and lethality of weapon systems) and visualization. The solution must support both current operational needs and have flexibility to accommodate future growth in data volume, model complexity, user demand, and computational intensity. This next generation environment will establish an open, scalable, and unified computational backbone designed to modernize Department decision support. The scope…

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