Institutionalizing Operations Analysis for Security and Defense in Bulgaria

Abstract

During the period of preparation for membership and accession to NATO, the administration of the security sector in Bulgaria had very limited access to expertise and tools to support decision making on key functions for the effective management of defense, such as long-term force planning, operations planning, and acquisition management. The institutes that had been responsible for such tasks were closed down as part of the downsizing of the defense establishment in the 1990s. A small number of researchers and analysts were transferred to other defense organizations, primarily to the Defense Advanced Research Institute (DARI), which is part of the “G.S. Rakovski” Defense and Staff College (DSC) in Sofia. Institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) employed others. The Operations Research (OR) Department in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in the BAS was primarily oriented toward theoretical studies and teaching. Some of the legacy software tools for decision support and Computer Assisted Exercises (CAX) packages were also available in DARI, but the level of connection between this institute and the larger civilian operations research community was limited. This was all that allowed Bulgaria to preserve a limited capacity to support defense decision making, but there were no opportunities to develop new methodologies and tools to address the new challenges to security and the needs of other security sector organizations. Given the lack of infrastructure and the limited access to security organizations, the small Bulgarian operations analysis (OA) community has not been utilized effectively to address the security challenges of the twenty-first century. Thus, Bulgaria faced considerable challenges in defining its defense requirements as a member of NATO, and later of the EU, developing affordable and interoperable capabilities, promoting inter-agency cooperation, and assuring effective and transparent financial, planning, and resource allocation procedures. At the same time, operations research, modeling, and simulation are an area of active research worldwide with a wide spectrum of applications, including planning, decision support, and conducting exercises. In addition, with the rapid developments in information technology during the past two decades, the methodology of modeling gained an increasingly prominent role in military, economics, social affairs, industry, education and other domains.