Computers and policy-making: the CASCON experiment

Abstract

Most observers of US foreign policy decision-making would probably agree that, whatever the virtues or defects of a particular policy choice, the process by which decisions are reached on crisis or incipient crisis situations leaves something to be desired. Despite good intentions, there persists an all-toofrequent tendency to be taken by surprise, to lurch from crisis to crisis, to under-use instruments of preventive diplomacy, and to be faced with situations in which only undesirable military options are available.The Nixon administration has identified some aspects of this problem, and announced various organizational and methodological means to overcome them. The results to date are, to say the least, not entirely convincing.And while as Americans our first concern is with US policy, the problem is by no means confined to the US decision-making apparatus. Rather, this tendency represents a weakness of governments in general, and of in-ternational organizations such as the United Nations, in anticipating and forfending unwanted and undesirable policy outcomes.If we define &dquo;crisis&dquo; as a short-time, highthreat, unexpected political-military situation (Hermann, 1969, p. 29), it is clear what some of the difficulties are for harassed and fallible humans to act in ways that are generally defined as systematic, if not &dquo;rational&dquo;. Surely rational decision-making connotes, at a minimum, processes of information search, comparison or contrast with other experience, and application of principles derived from previously validated propositions.Anyone who has worked in the crisis business is painfully aware of the customary inadequacy of information; of how other situations seem to be remote or unhelpful; and the way in which curbstone judgments, horseback opinions, and gut reactions constitute invariable substitutes for explicit systematic analysis.And crises are different and demanding, but because of the exigent nature of crises, advance planning becomes even more a necessity. Yet in the American policy community, many of the needful arts of the systematic policy planner-anticipating, forecasting, acting preventively, preparing contingent plans-have been treated at best on suffrance, at worst as exotic and harmfully '

The Situational Levers of Negotiating Flexibility

“…Referred to in an earlier literature as 'superimposing general dimensions on specific cases' (Bloomfield and Beattie, 1971;Druckman and Iaquinta, 1974), this analytic strategy is the basis for comparative work. Comparison is facilitated when different cases are described or "coded" in terms of the same attributes.…”

The Analytic Requirements for Free-Form Gaming

“…The MIT CASCON games went one step further and encoded data on crisis management which the game participants could use to analyze their particular situations and possibly assess their options (Bloomfield and Beattie, 1971). The Newport NEWS/ WARS facilities have used computer graphics to plot and display the movement of naval units as well as to calculate battle damage assessments.…”

“…The basic rationale behind this survey is to determine what gaming elements might augment the current state of the free-form gaming art such that it might confidently assume these new roles and dimensions. Past efforts to this end, such as on-line computer terminals to facilitate the real-time processing of information or the videotaping of the exercise (Bloomfield and Beattie, 1971) are little more than &dquo;technological fixes.&dquo; None have addressed fundamental problems inherent with free-form, manual gaming. Let us propose two sets of conditions for examining the gaming/ simulation universe as it might be relevant to free-form political-military gaming.…”

JOHN V. GILLESPIE and BETTY A. NESVOLD, eds., Macro-Quantitative Analysis, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1971. PETER HEINTZ, ed., A Macrosociological Theory of Societal Systems, volumes 1 and 2, Bern, Switzerland, Hans Huber Publishers, 1972. SUSAN JONES and J. DAVID SINGER, Beyond Conjecture in International Politics, Abstracts of Data Based Research, Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, 1972. R. J. RUMMEL, The Dimensions of Nations, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972. BRUCE M. RUSSETT, ed., Peace, War, and Numbers, Beverly Hills:

“…Hilton (1971: 91) observes that &dquo;DON evidently sees its role as one of using social science to provide accurate background forecasts about the international environment which will help in the planning of long range foreign policy postures.&dquo; It is upon the data base and the middle-range theory described above that such policy-oriented goals are being approached. An example of one such attempt is CASCON-computer-aided system for handling information on local conflicts (Bloomfield and Beattie, 1971 )-which is a computerized tool created to aid policy makers in managing local conflicts. A system with a similarly extensive information retrieval capability but with a greater modeling capacity is CACIS-computer-aided conflict information system (Tanter, 1972a).…”