Visualizing capability requirements in planning scenarios using Principal Component Analysis

In recent years, a shift has occurred in defence strategic planning from being equipment focused towards being capability focused. As a result, several defence departments employ capability based planning in their force development processes rather than the traditional threat based model. However, this has led to a capability requirement visualization problem; that is, given a capability taxonomy, a set of planning scenarios, and a requirement assessment of each capability within each scenario, what are the ways to effectively and efficiently summarize and communicate the pan-scenario capability requirements to decision-makers. In this paper, we apply unsupervised learning techniques to the capability requirement visualization problem. We demonstrate how Principal Components Analysis and k-means clustering may be used to visualize and effectively communicate pan-scenario capability requirements to decision-makers.