Pre-Conflict Management Tools

The Pre-Conflict Management Tools (PCMT) Program was developed to transform how intelligence analysts, policy analysts, operational planners, and decision makers interact when confronting highly complex strategic problems. The PCMT Program capitalizes on technologies and methods that help users collect, process, perform analyses with large quantities of data, and employ computational modeling and simulation methods to determine the probability and likelihood of state failure. The Program's computational decision aids and planning methodology help policymakers and military planners devise activities that can mitigate the consequences of civil war, or prevent state failure altogether. State failure has become an increasingly important national and international security issue since the end of the Cold War. Weak and failed states establish a nexus of interests between global terrorism, embattled leaders or insurgents, and large populations easily mobilized by a combination of violent ideology and economic opportunity. Civil war, the most common form of armed conflict around the world, undermines regional and international stability and catalyzes larger national security problems, such as weapons proliferation, organized crime, and terrorism. The PCMT Program builds on social science research on state failure and conflict, by turning government users into consumers of social science models employed by academic researchers and validated through peer review processes and implementation by practitioners. By constructing an analytic suite out of existing models, the Program avoids the controversies of 1960's social science research programs, such as Project Camelot, by rejecting the notion of a single, government-sponsored theory of conflict or placing policymakers in the position of determining what is or is not valid social science. PCMT architecture and methodology capitalize on changes in the landscape of information made possible by the ever-increasing quantity and diversity of information available electronically, by modeling, simulation, and analysis for identifying social vulnerabilities, and by a collaborative analytic and planning process at interagency and international levels. Each component of the PCMT architecture incorporates or extends established tools and practices that have improved performance in a variety of endeavors in other domains. The PCMT data collection capability helps the user organize and exploit all information available in electronic form, whether collected from open sources or the user's private databases. This enables analysts to filter data, rather than sample from small populations of sources whose ability to represent the character of the available universe of data is in doubt. Moreover, automated document coding enables analysts to work from datasets that would be too costly to construct, maintain, and manipulate manually. As a result, PCMT data collection and management technologies enable users to perform new kinds of analysis. The PCMT modeling and simulation suite contains multiple models of social vulnerabilities that assess the probability of state failure. Each model instantiates a different social science theory as to why states fail and civil war occurs. The suite gives policymakers diverse perspectives on each country or region. The application of multiple, competing models in analytic processes also assists users in confronting uncertainty by preventing decision makers from developing plans based on the outputs of a single model or theory. Instead, the PCMT suite assists users in crafting robust, adaptive policies that satisfice across landscapes of potential futures or scenarios generated through simulation Finally, PCMT is constructed to facilitate communication and analysis at interagency and international levels. By giving users warning of state failure months in advance, coalitions, partnerships, and plans can be formed to head off a crisis.