Physics and physicists at the Center for Naval Analyses

Doing an experiment to see how the results stack up against a model is a basic element of scientific practice. But if you’re working at the Large Hadron Collider, “everything takes years to come to fruition,” says Yousi Ma, who got his PhD from Caltech in 2012 by that route. These days, Ma still works in an area renowned for expensive, high-tech equipment, but he sees results a lot faster.

Ma has just finished his first year as a research analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) that performs research mainly for the US Navy and US Marine Corps. In that time he’s become a regular visitor to the Pentagon, participated in briefings with admirals, and seen research influence practical decision making on a time scale of months.

The Center for Naval Analyses is part of CNA , a not-for-profit research and analysis organization based in Alexandria, Virginia. CNA has its roots in efforts 70 years ago to assess the threat of German submarines during World War II. Back then, researchers deployed with the navy to see at firsthand the enemy’s capabilities and the real-world practicalities affecting the navy’s response.

That philosophy continues today: CNA personnel routinely spend a year or more as onsite analysts working with active military units around the world. “We use models to make predictions, then check them against the real world,” says Keith Costa, director of CNA’s Advanced Technology and Systems Analysis program. For him and other PhD physicists at CNA, that’s the scientific attraction of the work. And because CNA staff work so closely with their military sponsors, “the immediacy of impact is a nice part of the job,” says Ma. “We see feedback, the results of experiments, then we can recommend changes and see their results.”

The emergence of what’s known as operations research during World War II was prompted by the appearance of new warfare technology. Analysts in the UK and the US had to learn how to deal with novel threats, notably U-boats, and how to make optimum use of new defenses, notably radar. Academic scientists drafted into the war effort applied their traditional skills to collect data then formulate models to make sense of what they found in order to improve military outcomes.

Since then, operations research has bloomed in the civilian world, in the form of management science, decision analysis, system optimization, and similar disciplines. But the military applications remain strong. Costa says that CNA aims to provide “full service” support by offering data-driven analysis of weapons and communication systems, use of sensors, the logistics of materiel and manpower deployment, and much more, all with the aim of refining military strategy in an empirically justifiable way.

Military operations depend, of course, not just on technology but also on the people putting that technology to use, and on the environment (physical and human) in which they are operating. Such complexities go beyond what the typical academic physicist has to contend with, and can be hard or impossible to quantify. Squaring up against such issues forces analysts “to figure out which parts are analytically tractable, then how to collect data,” says Costa.

Principal research scientist Kent Nordstrom says that figuring out how to analyze the complexities of military operations is not so different from designing physics experiments. “You can’t directly determine, say, the imaginary part of a Greens function, but you can measure a voltage to get at the theoretical concept. It’s all a matter of what we can measure that relates to the stated problem.”

Fleet presence

For example, the naval concept of “fleet presence” captures the totality of where ships are, what they can do, by what means, with which personnel, and so on. Feeding into fleet presence are straightforward quantities, such as how fast ships move and how many days sailors are permitted to be at sea, along with more elusive elements, such as the utility of one weapon system relative to another in a given situation or the effectiveness of organization and command structure. It’s in the latter area in particular that the presence of CNA personnel aboard ships or in other locations becomes crucial, says Harvey Spivack, director of CNA’s Maritime Search and Undersea Warfare program.

Much technical data is held in electronic form and can be accessed after the event, but “we need to see people in action and observe their interaction.” The overall performance of a complex system can come down to “how and when people press the button,” as he puts it. Analysts must understand what life is like for people in the field, says Nordstrom. “When they are supposed to submit a report by phone, how easy or difficult is that?” Such niceties are invisible to personnel in the head office, he adds.

To work constructively in the field, CNA researchers have to learn and adapt to military culture—something that will be quite alien to most of those coming out of PhD programs. But ignorance of military ways can be an advantage, analysts say, because it brings a fresh perspective. It’s not important which discipline of physics CNA analysts come from, says Costa, but they must love research and be willing to jump into novel areas and work with people from other fields—chemistry, economics, political science, even psychology. “And on ships,” he adds, “we take flights and have adventures collecting data. It’s not like going to academic conferences.”

New arrivals at CNA gain familiarity with US Navy and Marine operations through field trips to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, and the US Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. These exercises “make you more knowledgeable and useful to command,” says Ma, who has not yet embarked on a long-term deployment but hopes to do so next year. Despite this preparation and CNA’s long history with the navy, “you may still have to prove your worth as an outsider,” says Spivack. “It’s good to pick on a problem you can help with quickly.”

Forming relationships with junior officers early in one’s career pays dividends later, when both CNA analysts and officers have risen to more senior positions. But the influence of CNA analysis on policy at the highest levels of military and civilian leadership in the Department of Defense is a matter not simply of connections but of being able to present research findings to a smart but often nontechnical audience. That means explaining assumptions and describing the thinking behind models in a way that makes reasoning transparent without getting lost in technical details—a skill, says Nordstrom, that’s in some ways reminiscent of good teaching in the academic world.

And it’s important to frame questions usefully, says Costa. For the navy to ask whether it needs 11 aircraft carriers or 12 is unanswerable without context. Instead, “we can say, if you have 12, this is what you can do.” That’s the kind of information that supports the highest levels of policymaking. “We answer to people with lots of stars,” says Spivack.

David Lindley is an author and editor based in Alexandria, Virginia. His most recent book is Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science (Doubleday, 2007).