Characterizing the Temperaments of Red and Blue Agents

This Note presents a structure for characterizing the temperament of alternative Red and Blue Agents, models representing national command-level decisionmakers in the RAND Strategy Assessment Center's system for automated war gaming. An agent temperament is designed to be a systematized description of the agent's general orientation concerning whether or how to wage war. Agent temperament, in conjunction with the environment in which the agent finds itself and the observed behavior of the opposing agent, guides the rules that dictate agent behaviors. A temperament is thus intended as a plausible characterization of the major dimensions in Soviet or American national command-level thinking that determine the general direction of escalatory policy and the selection of war plans. The authors propose that temperament be expressed within four general themes: strategic orientation, warfighting style, flexibility, and perception. Within each theme, the agent is defined by a number of attributes.