Estimating Impact

Virtually all human endeavors can be analyzed and modeled and understood through computer-aided study, and that is very much at the core of operations research, game theory, and decision science. Careful analysis helps organizations operate more effectively, whether they re manufacturing products, providing health care, or running a fleet of delivery trucks, and this is done day in and day out. Yet nations will go to war, or launch a major humanitarian relief effort, or intervene in the existence of some neighboring state without any comparable quantitative analysis, and often pay dearly for it, whether in actual monetary costs, loss of life, failure to save lives, damaged international relationships, or any combination of these. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq are but two glaring examples of interventions that lacked careful quantitative analysis, and both are widely viewed as badly flawed, if not outright failures.§Understanding the potential impact of any action is critical to the success of that action, and in ESTIMATING IMPACT: A Handbook of Computational Methods and Models for Anticipating Economic, Social, Political and Security Effects in International Interventions Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, demonstrate how military or humanitarian interventions (or the decision not to intervene) can be rigorously analyzed beforehand and their likely impacts and ramifications predicted at levels appropriate to their scope. A wide range of modeling programs are available that support plan assessment and impact forecast, and they allow accurate prediction within an interdependent set of political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure systems, and experts involved in the use and development of these tools demonstrate how, when, and why they should be used.§Additionally, visualization tools, data mining tools, and manipulation tools are discussed that support model population and operations monitoring, along with considerations of what is still needed to help this stunningly practical use of decision science technologies advance even further. This is essential reading for the entire OR/MS and Computer Science community involved in researching and developing these tools; the entire government, military, and policy community involved in making the decisions behind intervention; and the entire business community looking for strong analytical tools that can be applied to their own domains of activity.