Pre-Conflict Management Tools: Winning the Peace

Abstract

Abstract : The Pre-Conflict Management Tools (PCMT) Program was developed to transform how intelligence analysts, policy analysts, operational planners, and decisionmakers 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.