The RAND Strategy Assessment Center

The RAND Strategy Assessment Center (RSAC) is an ambitious multiyear effort to improve methods of strategy analysis by combining the best features of war gaming and analytic modeling. The approach is based on automated war gaming in which human teams are replaced by decision models using heuristic behavior rules and by a force operations model treating interrelationships among strategic and other forces, events in different theaters, and the operations of the several military services. The result is a capability for complex multiscenario analysis that has not previously existed. The power of the approach is due in large part to its emphasis on realism (relative to more standard approaches) and to the use of artificial intelligence and force modeling techniques that make behavior rules and other key assumptions both transparent and interactively variable. This report provides an introduction to RSAC work for those unfamiliar with it. It also provides a summary of recent conceptual and technical progress, interim conclusions about the utility of RSAC methodology, a plan for future development, and references to more detailed RSAC publications.