To be effective, military and interagency planners must consider the full spectrum of activities that could achieve operational goals, and must understand the effects of using those actions on a target area. To do this, planning tools must support analysis in the DIME-PMESII space. Furthermore, these tools must be in the hands of the domain experts such that they can build and use their own models that represent their own theory of the conflict. This paper describes a toolkit (called PSTK) for building social models of the power structures in a region of interest. This toolkit allows an analyst to build models representing hypotheses about the social power relationships and dynamics in region, and to experiment with those models in service of operations planning. We also describe how this tool is being used in a program for integrating a range of models into the planning process.
Reference:
Taylor, G., Bechtel, R., Knudsen, K., Waltz, E., & White, J. (2008). “PSTK: A Toolkit for Modeling Dynamic Power Structures.” Paper presented at BRIMS, Providence, RI.
