Some Lessons Learned from Building Red Agents in the RAND Strategy Assessment System (RSAS)

Abstract

This note contains the text of an oral presentation delivered to the third 'Thinking Red in War Games' workshop held in June 1988. It describes some of the lessons learned from developing political level and theater-commander level decision models for use in the RSAS. These knowledge-based models (called Red Agents) can represent alternative mindsets and alternative military strategies. The author begins with a short summary of RSAS architecture and a discussion of reasons for having Red Agents. He then illustrates the use of Red Agents with two examples: 1) an assessment of flexible response that illustrates how the rigor required in modeling can change fundamental perceptions about escalation and deescalation; and 2) a representation of alternative theater- level Red operational strategies for force employment in the Central Region that demonstrates how critical the strategy variable is in analysis, and shows that it can now be explored, rather than left buried in the script-like databases that concludes that working with Red Agent models is valuable, and has enormous potential. Keywords: War games; Military strategy; Strategic analysis; Simulation; Decision making.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1989
Accession Number
ADA220114

Entities

People

  • Paul K. Davis

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Counter WMD
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Databases
  • Doctrine
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Lessons Learned
  • Military Doctrine
  • Military Strategy
  • National Security
  • Nuclear Weapons
  • Second World War
  • Simulations
  • Strategic Analysis
  • United States
  • Ussr
  • War Games
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Game Theory.
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Systems Analysis and Design