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Estimating Impact: A Handbook of Computational Methods and Models for Anticipating Economic, Social, Political and Security Effects in International Interventions - Softcover
Synopsis
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.
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From the Back Cover
International interventions are among the most controversial and complex of human endeavors. In today's smaller, flatter, and interdependent world, interventions of all sorts - economic sanctions or aid, natural-disaster relief, various diplomatic or civil-military engagements―are likely to persist and to become yet more complex and difficult. The last decade has seen an explosive growth of research on methods and tools, particularly computational tools, for estimating effects of interventions. In ESTIMATING IMPACT Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, offer readers a broad and practical introduction to computational approaches for anticipating effects of interventions. International interventions and estimating effects of such interventions on human, economic, social, and political variables are of critical importance to business analysts and planners as well as to government policy planners and non-governmental humanitarian organizations. In current practice, intervention-related decisions, planning, and effects estimating rely on historical analogies, on qualitative theories, on expert opinions, experience, and intuition. ESTIMATING IMPACT argues for a broader, more balanced view. It describes how emerging computational techniques can help analysts, planners, and decision-makers in a number of ways: estimating the range of likely future conditions, highlighting unwarranted assumptions, generating alternative approaches, elucidating details and uncovering the potential for unanticipated effects. While the field is still very young, the trend is unmistakable: there is a rising recognition that quantitative, computational methods are indispensable elements―although by no means panaceas ―for making prudent decisions regarding international interventions.
Review
From the reviews:
“Anyone involved in modeling or planning will want this excellent introduction. ... The book also includes a variety of case studies and examples. The editors provide several tables so that the reader may locate an example related to a mechanism of intervention, an effect of intervention, or a modeling technique. The references at the end of each chapter, as well as the index, are well done. ... an excellent introduction to the current field of modeling interventions, and will be useful and worthwhile to readers.” (Brad Reid, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2011)
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