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An EO/IR targeting forecast is not one model. It is five models chained end to end — sun and moon position, the weather, a thermal model of the target and its background, the atmosphere between the target and the sensor, and the sensor and observer at the far end. TAWS, the Target Acquisition Weapons Software that Air Force and Navy forecasters have run since the late 1990s, hides that chain behind a single printed number: a detection or lock-on range in nautical miles.
Here is the thesis of this teaching area. Operators do not fail on the physics. They fail on the inputs. Every documented TAWS assessment — Fallon in 1997, Nellis in 2004 — found the same thing: the model was within about twenty percent when it was fed the right target, the right background, the right dew point, the right visibility in the right units, the right time of day in the right time zone. It was wrong by half, or its polarity flipped, when one of those "clerical details" was wrong. The tool prints a confident number either way.
So these lessons do two jobs. They teach the physics — Planck, Beer–Lambert, thermal crossover, MRTD and the Johnson criteria, illuminance, the 1.064 µm laser path — with the arithmetic done by hand. And every lesson is built around an input mistake and what it does to the answer, so that when you see a range on a TDA you know which knob it is hanging from.
Who this is for. Information Warfare Officers, Enlisted Information Warfare Specialists, METOC forecasters, and anyone who has to brief an EO/IR product to a strike planner or an aircrew. You need algebra and a willingness to multiply an exponential by hand once. You do not need calculus or radiometry.
How to use it. Read straight through the first time — the lessons build toward Lesson 6, where the whole chain is solved by hand, and Lesson 10, which is the operator failure catalogue. Each lesson ends with a Try it box that deep-links into the Explorer with a place, a date, a target, a background, a sensor and a weather setting, and says in words what you should see. Doing them is most of the learning.