Welcome to the
Defense Futures Simulator
Create, simulate, and analyze alternative strategies and budgets.
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We do not have and probably never will have enough money to buy all the things we could effectively use for our defense. The choices we have to make would be difficult and painful even if our military budget were twice what it is today. The fact that we are dealing with a lesser sum only makes the choices harder and more painful.
Defense strategy is about choices
Strategic choices should determine how funding is allocated among competing priorities in the defense budget. While a strategy set without regard for resource constraints risks being inexecutable in practice, a budget set without regard for strategy risks being ineffective and inefficient in how it allocates resources.
Explore alternatives
The simulator allows you to quickly explore a range of strategic choices and budget options—and understand the connections between them. DFS helps facilitate a better understanding of defense issues and tradeoffs, provides scholars and practitioners an easy and accessible way to develop and test alternative strategies and funding profiles, and advances the state of the art in defense analysis.
How DFS Works
1. Make an Account
Anyone can create an account free of charge—all you need is a valid email address. You can save scenarios in your account and return to your work later, share scenarios to collaborate with other users, and test alternative approaches by copying scenarios and editing them.
2. Select a Scenario
To create a scenario, first select a baseline budget and strategy as a starting point and all changes made in the scenario will be relative to this baseline.
3. Use the Intelligent Assistant
The DFS Intelligent Assistant is the connection between strategy and budgets. It learns how your strategic preferences relate to specific budgetary decisions, and rather than manually sorting through hundreds of lines in the budget looking for items to add or cut, it automatically searches for a set of choices that correspond to your strategic preferences. It can also be used in reverse, taking a set of proposed changes to the budget and “scoring” what these changes imply in terms of shifts in strategic preferences. For those who prefer a more hands-on approach, you can skip the Intelligent Assistant entirely and build your scenario manually.
4. Model the Budget and Force Structure
At the heart of DFS is the budget model. It estimates and aggregates the total costs and force structure implications of each change made from baseline. It includes realistic constraints on how much an item can be altered from the baseline to account for industrial base limitations and other factors.
5. Learn and Evolve
DFS is built to continuously learn and improve as it is used. As more people use the tool, the Intelligent Agent builds its understanding of the complex interrelationships at play in the strategy and budget. DFS is not limited to just the U.S. military—stay tuned as baseline data for more countries are added!
We’ve worked with lots of amazing people
The Defense Futures Simulator has been an indispensable tool for our SAIS graduate class that requires teams to construct a US Defense Strategy with a five year detailed budget plan. Our student teams use the DFS to gain an in-depth understanding of the difficult decisions and trade offs for different budget scenarios and how they would shape the U.S. military for its worldwide commitments. We have been amazed at how much our students have learned using the DFS and we plan to continue to make this project the centerpiece of our course!
Dave Barno and Nora BensahelProfessors of Practice at JHU SAISThe AEI Defense Futures Simulator is a uniquely useful tool for connecting strategy to budget as it credibly generates if/then scenarios to improve understanding of force structure, capability and other programmatic decisions and trade-offs. For example, DFS was the engine behind the analysis in my recent work to explain the defense budget implications of a Russian victory over Ukraine and therefore why assisting Ukraine is in the best financial interest of the United States.
Elaine McCuskerFormer Deputy and Acting DoD Comptroller and current AEI Senior Fellow
Elevate your defense analysis.
Start using DFS today.
Get started with a free account and see how the Defense Futures Simulator can take your defense analysis to the next level.