As defined by Carl Von Clausewitz (On War, 1832), the center of gravity of an entity (state, alliance, coalition, or group) is the foundation of capability, the hub of all power and movement, upon which everything depends, the point against which all the energies should be directed. If a combatant eliminates or influences the enemy’s strategic center of gravity, then the enemy will lose control of its power and resources and will eventually fall to defeat. If a combatant fails to adequately protect his own strategic center of gravity, he invites disaster (see Giles P.K. and Galvin T.P., Center of Gravity: Determination, Analysis and Application, Center or Strategic Leadership, US Army War College, 1996).
The collaborative assistant for rapid knowledge formation and reasoning, developed by GMU as part of the DARPA RKF program, is applied, jointly with the US Army War College, to build a knowledge base and a Disciple agent for the Center of Gravity domain. The Disciple knowledge-based agent is used in experiments in a sequence of two courses at USAWC: "Case Studies in Center of Gravity Determination" and "Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence". In the first course, the students study the CoG domain and conduct detailed, individual case studies. They use Disciple in a project requiring the modeling of CoG determination and analysis. In the second course, the students use an extended version of Disciple-CoG/RKF for two purposes: 1) to learn about basic areas of Artificial Intelligence, such as Knowledge Representation, Problem Solving, Knowledge Acquisition and Learning (during their regular classes), and 2) to develop intelligent agents for the identification of strategic center of gravity candidates (as their class project).
At the US Army War College, this joint research effort is supervised by:
The main experts from the US Army War College participating in this effort are: