CDEC.

Format:

Video

Contributor:

United States. Army Pictorial Center.

United States. Dept. of the Army.

Series:

Academic Video Online

Big picture ; episode 525

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States. Army. Combat Developments Command. Experimentation Center.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (29 min.).

Place of Publication:

Washington D.C. : Army Pictorial Service, 1961.

Language Note:

In English.

Original language in English.

Summary:

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 up to draw the enemies 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., CONARC, realized that a set-up would have to be created where operational military concepts for the future could be evaluated under conditions just short of actual war. Where a 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, CONARC decided to adopt and apply some of the latest principles of purer, impartial scientific research. For a laboratory, they would need a varied landscape with all the terrain features which the concepts they wish 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, CONARC finally selected the state of California . There, in 1956, they founded the Combat Development Experimentation Center or 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.

Notes:

Title from resource description page (viewed Nov. 26, 2010).

Previously published as DVD.

OCLC:

701797394