Quantifying a State's Reputation in the Strategic Competition and Crisis Wargame for the Center for Army Analysis

Abstract

The Center for Army Analysis (CAA) developed the Strategic Competition and Crisis (SC2) wargame to capture how modern military competition operates in today’s world. The CAA tasked our interdisciplinary team with developing a more robust, well-rounded reputation model for quantifying a state’s reputation based on another state’s perspective using each of our respective specialties within systems engineering, defense and strategic studies, and operations research. The team leveraged tools within the Systems Decision Process (SDP) to quantify the theoretical, intangible concept of reputation. Research began with a qualitative value model based on expert stakeholder analysis and a literature review. The team then identified value measures to build a swing weight matrix that produced a reputation score for each state from another state’s perspective. The concept of swing weighting incorporates prioritized value measures while accounting for variance in the raw data that is used to aggregate a score for each country’s reputation level. That score, alongside an enhanced Game User Interface (GUI), can now be integrated into the existing SC2 wargame to provide a more complete, narrative experience that charts player decisions throughout the game and educates senior Army leaders on how to effectively leverage military activities towards achieving strategic goals.