Download or read book The Rand Strategy Assessment Center An Overview and Interim Conclusions about Utility and Development Options written by Rand Corporation and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rand Strategy Assessment Center (RSAC) is an ambitious multiyear effort to improve methods of strategy analysis by combining the best features of war gaming and analytic modeling. The approach is based on automated war gaming in which human teams are replaced by decision models (computer automatons) using heuristic behavior rules and by a force operational model treating: interrelationships among strategic and other forces, events in different theaters, and the operations of the several military services. The result is a capability for complex multiscenario analysis that has not previously existed. The power of the approach is due in large part to its emphasis on realism (relative to more standard approaches) and to the use of artificial-intelligence and force-modeling techniques that make behavior rules and other key assumptions both transparent and interactively variable. This report provides an introduction to RSAC work for those unfamiliar with it. It also provides, for those following the program more closely: a summary of recent conceptual and technical progress, interim conclusions about the utility of RSAC methodology, a plan for future development, and references to more detailed RSAC publications. (Author).
Download or read book The Rand Strategy Assessment Center written by Herbert J. Shukiar and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rand Strategy Assessment Center (RSAC) is a highly ambitious, multiyear research program to develop a system and methodology that combine the systematic reproducibility of analytic modeling/simulation with the behavioral richness of rule-based artificial intelligence technology. The system combines an adaptive simulation model of precombat and combat operations with three rule-based artificial intelligence agents that represent Red, Blue, and third-country behavior. The adaptive simulation model, called the Force Agent, simulates ground, air, and naval warfare in both conventional and nuclear settings on a theaterwide or global basis. The two superpower agents, Red Agent and Blue Agent, utilize wakeup rules to examine the world situation. Third-country behavior is represented by another rule-based agent--Scenario Agent. This paper examines the relationships among the four agents from the system interface, database management, and system control perspectives. The paper also discusses how the RSAC system can be used to support both automated and interactive war games.
Download or read book RAND and the Information Evolution written by Willis H. Ware and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2008 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This professional memoir describes RAND's contributions to the evolution of computer science, particularly during the first decades following World War II, when digital computers succeeded slide rules, mechanical desk calculators, electric accounting machines, and analog computers. The memoir includes photographs and vignettes that reveal the collegial, creative, and often playful spirit in which the groundbreaking research was conducted at RAND.
Download or read book Overview of System Software in the RAND Strategy Assessment System written by Paul K. Davis and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Note documents and updates a briefing given in January 1988 on the system-software aspects of the RAND Strategy Assessment System.
Download or read book The Rand Strategy Assessment System s Green Agent Model of Third country Behavior in Superpower Crises and Conflict written by Rand Corporation and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Green Agent, formerly called Scenario Agent, is the Rand Strategy Assessment System's (RSAS's) rule-based computer model of third-country political-military behavior in conflicts involving one or both superpowers. This Note describes the third-generation version, and supersedes all previous Scenario Agent documentation. The Note provides information needed to set up and run the Green Agent in RSAS war games. It should be of interest both to political-military analysts and to modelers.
Download or read book Knowledge Based Simulation written by Paul A. Fishwick and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge-Based Simulation: Methodology and Application represents a recent compilation of research material that reviews fundamental concepts of simulation methodology and knowledge-based simulation applications. Knowledge-based simulation represents a new and exciting bridge area linking the fields of computer simulation and artificial intelligence. This book will appeal to both theorists and practitioners who require simulation to solve complex problems. A primary attraction of the book is its emphasis on both methodology and applications. In this way, the reader can explore new methods for encoding knowledge-inten- sive information into a simulation model, and new applications that utilize these methods.
Download or read book The Rush to Policy written by Peter William House and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rush to Policy explores the appropriate role of technical analysis in policy formulation. The authors ask when and how the use of sophisticated analytic techniques in decision-making benefits the nation. They argues that these techniques are too often used in situations where they may not be needed or understood by the decision maker, where they may not be to answer the questions raised but are nonetheless required by law. House and Shull provide an excellent empirical base for describing the impact of politics on policies, policy analysis, and policy analysts. They examine cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, and decision analysis and assess their ability to substitute for the current decision-making process in the public sector. They examine the political basis of public sector decision-making, how individuals and organizations make decisions, and the ways decisions are made in the federal sector. Also, they discuss the mandate to use these methods in the policy formulation process. The book is written by two practicing federal policy analysts who, in a decade of service as policy researchers, developed sophisticated quantitative analytic and decision-making techniques. They then spent several years trying to use them in the real world. Success and failures are described in illuminating detail, providing insight not commonly found in such critiques. The authors delineate the interaction of politics and technical issues. Their book describes policy analysis as it is, not how it ought to be. Peter W. House is the director of policy research and analysis at the National Science Foundation. He is the author of ten books on multidisciplinary science and technology policy research and analyses in government, private, and university sectors, including The Art of Public Policy Analysis and with Roger D. Shull, Regulatory Reform: Politics and the Environment and Regulations and Science: Management of Research on Demand. Roger D. Shull is a senior analyst at the Division of Policy Research and Analysis, National Science Foundation.
Download or read book Treatment of Escalation in the Rand Strategy Assessment Center written by Charles Glaser and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Rand Note reviews mechanisms of escalation that should be included in the work of the Rand Strategy Assessment Center (RSAC), and discusses alternative ways of doing so analytically. It assumes that the reader is familiar with the RSAC's objectives, technical approach, and terminology. The appendix discusses some of these matters briefly. The Note begins by discussing the relationship between escalation for direct military benefit and escalation as a form of generalized bargaining in the sense of Schelling. It then identifies six important factors causing escalation to become difficult to control. Having outlined the escalation issues to be addressed and some of the relevant variables to be included in RSAC exercises, the Note considers two analytic techniques for doing so: formal decision analysis and heuristic rule-based modeling. The Note concludes that decision analysis may be invaluable for developing and evaluating rules even if little vestige of formal analysis will exist explicitly in most of the final Red and Blue Agent programs. (Authors).
Download or read book The Last Warrior written by Andrew F. Krepinevich and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank, under twelve defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. At the RAND Corporation during its golden age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marshall helped formulate bedrock concepts of US nuclear strategy that endure to this day; later, at the Pentagon, he pioneered the development of “net assessment”—a new analytic framework for understanding the long-term military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Following the Cold War, Marshall successfully used net assessment to anticipate emerging disruptive shifts in military affairs, including the revolution in precision warfare and the rise of China as a major strategic rival of the United States. In The Last Warrior, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts—both former members of Marshall’s staff—trace Marshall’s intellectual development from his upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to his decades in Washington as an influential behind-the-scenes advisor on American defense strategy. The result is a unique insider’s perspective on the changes in US strategy from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day. Covering some of the most pivotal episodes of the last half-century and peopled with some of the era’s most influential figures, The Last Warrior tells Marshall’s story for the first time, in the process providing an unparalleled history of the evolution of the American defense establishment.
Download or read book Main Theater Warfare Modeling in the Rand Strategy Assessment System 3 0 written by Rand Corporation and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Note provides an overview of the main theater warfare model developed as part of the RAND Strategy Assessment System (RSAS, Release 3.0), in a game-structured simulation of global conflict. This model covers land and air combat in Central Europe and Korea and is part of a global combat model (CAMPAIGN) that provides a fully integrated treatment of conventional, theater-nuclear, and intercontinental-nuclear warfare worldwide. The model has been designed to answer "What if?" questions quickly, to be used either as a closed simulation or as an interactive game, and to be flexible. It permits the user to vary assumptions about a broad range of qualitative and quantitative issues such as national fighting effectiveness, maximum combat intensity, air-ground interactions, etc. The model is also unique in its treatment of maneuver because it allows the attacker and defender to have explicit concepts of maneuver at corps level and above.
Download or read book Modeling of Soft Factors in the Rand Strategy Assessment System RSAS written by Paul K. Davis and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting "soft factors" (defined as factors not yet reflected explicitly in analysis, and not yet well understood) has been a major goal since the RAND Strategy Assessment System (RSAS) was designed in 1982. This paper discusses how selected soft factors have been and could be represented in combat models, theater-level decision models dealing with command-control issues, and national-command-level models dealing with issues of national policy, strategy, and controls. The paper also discusses the (limited) empirical basis for the assumptions used and speculates about the degree to which the empirical and subjective bases could be improved. Finally, it notes several recent examples of policy-level analysis that have been strongly affected by assumptions about soft factors involving human and organizational issues--notably factors involving readiness, surprise, national fighting quality, the break-point phenomenon, and command-control adaptability.
Download or read book Modeling and Analysis of Conventional Defense in Europe written by Reiner K. Huber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of contributions to a workshop on "Long-teY'fr/ Development of NATO's Conventional Forrward Defense" to which the GERMAN STRATEGY FORUM (DSF*» had invited some 50 systems analysts and defense experts of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany and the SHAPE Technical Centre. Held in Bonn from 2 to 4 December 1984, this workshop was to provide a forum for the dis cussion, at a non-political expert level and in the light of available analysis results, of proposals for the improvement of NATO's conventional defense capabilities. In addition, it aimed at arriving at some recommenda tions as to which of these proposals deserve to be studied further and what methodological deficiencies must be alleviated and information gaps closed for an adequate assessment. The idea to organize this workshop has been discussed ever since 1980 with several defense systems analysts in the US and the UK who shared the opinion that, with a view to the immense global build-up of the Soviet threat on one hand and the stringency of defense resources in most NATO countries on the other, there is no reason that could permit us to dismiss any proposal promising improvement without careful study.
Download or read book Simple Models to Explore Deterrence and More General Influence in the War with Al Qaeda written by Paul K. Davis and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deterring terrorism is best approached as part of a broad effort to influence all elements of a terrorist system, and simple, conceptual models of decisionmaking can help in understanding how to affect others' behavior. The paper lays out a theory of how to use influence to affect elements of a terrorist system, touching on root causes, individual motivation, public support, and likely factors in the decisionmaking of terrorist organizations.
Download or read book Rand s Experience in Applying Artificial Intelligence Techniques to Strategic level Military political War Gaming written by Paul K. Davis and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper highlights some recent experience in Rand's Strategy Assessment Center (RSAC), a large-scale DoD program to develop new concepts and techniques combining features of war gaming and analytic modeling. The centerpiece of the program is a system for automated war gaming in which some or all political and military national decisions can be made by automatons, and in which both force operations and combat are described by theater and strategic-level models. The RSAC development program is providing a wealth of technical and managerial lessons in adapting and extending such artificial intelligence (AI) techniques as scripts, production rules, English-readable programming languages, goal-directed search, and pattern matching. Most previous AI applications have dealt with smaller and less-complex problems, and have not had to combine AI techniques with those of well-structured system programming and algorithmic combat modeling. Also, the RSAC integration effort has brought together professionals from at least a half-dozen cultures with good ideas but different notions of what constitutes good practice and natural logic. The experience has been illuminating, and the emerging synthesis is unlike previous simulations of which we are aware. (Author).
Download or read book Policymaking Under Adversity written by Yehezkel Dror and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study systematically treats recent policymaking trends, starting with a reconsideration of salient theoretical issues of policymaking and its study and culminating with a survey of current policy-related predicaments in various countries. Dror proposes that the task for social science research is to uncover underlying causes of policymaking inadequacies. Standard research methods, Dror states, have been unable to uncover the realities of important decisions made inside governments. In order to gain an understanding of pressing predicaments, he believes that policymakers need to examine the foundations of contemporary practices of present assumptions, and that they need a multiplicity of approaches to policymaking.After prescribing a set of requirements that policymaking must satisfy in order to adequately respond to challenges, Dror posits several improvements needed in education and in policy decision making. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography, including numerous important German works not found in other English-language studies. This book supplements the earlier basic theory and models propounded in Dror's Public Policymaking Reexamined by dealing with current trends. As a guide to public policy literature and related works, it will be invaluable to students and practitioners.
Download or read book New Challenges New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking written by Stuart E. Johnson and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2003-03-31 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is still easy to underestimate how much the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War?--and then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?--transformed the task of American foreign and defense policymaking. In place of predictability (if a sometimes terrifying predictability), the world is now very unpredictable. In place of a single overriding threat and benchmark by which all else could be measured, a number of possible threats have arisen, not all of them states. In place of force-on-force engagements, U.S. defense planners have to assume "asymmetric" threats?--ways not to defeat U.S. power but to render it irrelevant. This book frames the challenges for defense policy that the transformed world engenders, and it sketches new tools for dealing with those challenges?--from new techniques in modeling and gaming, to planning based on capabilities rather than threats, to personnel planning and making use of "best practices" from the private sector.
