Concept development and operations – end report

This document reports the research activities that have been conducted by FFI-prosject 1342 Concept development and operations (KONOPS). The ambition is to give a complete list of written publications. KONOPS was established 4. June 2014 and finished 1. March 2019. It was the major research project in the research program Operational Analysis at FFI, which should provide research based multi-disciplinary analyses to support national and international military operations. The mission was to support the armed forces’ operational staffs in operations, exercises, concept development, scenario planning and development and experimentation. In practice, the establishment of KONOPS was a merge of four projects. The main reason behind this was to make the project less vulnerable to changes in staffing and reduce the overall administrative costs. It was also assumed that there was a potential synergy between the four projects that was not realized. There was an ambition to realize this with multi-disciplinary research on military operations. The ambition was not fulfilled. The result was a larger project with related activities that was working alongside each other, but not together. The main reason for this was that there was never defined a common goal that demanded multi-disciplinary problem solving Nevertheless, the project has had a very positive unintended effect. The lack of common goal has given the researchers freedom to cooperate on many other arenas, both within each researchers discipline and multi-disciplinary and has produced books, concepts, reports, papers and contributed on conferences with great value, not only for FFI, but nationally and for UN and NATO as well. So, even though the multi-disciplinary internal project failed, the project has succeeded by generating valuable R&D on the arenas where goals has been defined. Some parts of the KONOPS project are continued within other FFI projects, e.g. direct analysis support to the Operational HQ and Strategic wargames, but other research areas are being terminated.