System Dynamics Conf. – V – Day 3, Part 1

I’m splitting Day 3 in two, as there were three presentations later in the day in addition to the regular papers. They’ll take at least another hour to write up, and right now, I want to sleep. Here’s the papers, three on insurgencies, one on biology:

• The Role of Influence Operations in a Counterinsurgency Battle by Elise Weaver
  • This author looked at the role of ‘influence operations’ in a counter-insurgency; apparently, that means effort expended to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the populace in order to diminish popular support for the insurgency and increase support for the counter-intersurgency. She first presented a high level model that gave a general overview of the different types of influence operations and their effects, then presented a number of smaller models that linked into it, each looking in more detail at a particular type of influence operation. These smaller models corresponded to:
    • Attrition
    • Recruitment
    • Intelligence
    • Collateral damage
    • Competitive contagion (the to and fro of popular sentiment)
  • The work was interesting, but it seemed like it was still fairly preliminary – the model seemed very high level, and thus really only managed to confirm results that seemed obvious. The author was quite honest about the drawbacks of her model, though, which is always good, but I think there’s definitely more work needed here.
• Implementing Irregular Warfare Policy Using Modeling and Simulation by Corey Lofdahl
  • This was one of those papers where I didn’t get a good take home message, but which was nonetheless interesting. In it, the author presented his experience building and presenting models for use by senior NATO decision makers, mostly based on ideas in the book The Quest for a Viable Peace. He didn’t go into a lot of depth on the models, but they covered topics such as government finance, military capacity, political will, and the like. He had a few entertaining stories about dealing with bureaucratic and military egos, too.
• A System Dynamics Perspective on Insurgency as a Business Enterprise by David Schoenwald, Curtis Johnson, Leonard Malczynski, George Backus
  • This paper took a really interesting and slightly cynical approach to thinking about insurgencies. It started with the premise that many of the monetary feedback loops that are true for business enterprises are probably true for insurgencies. Both require money and, though ideology is a motivating factor for some, many insurgents likely follow a profit based motive, whether money or the power money buys is the final goal. Furthermore, there’s analogies to be drawn between marketing and propaganda, and between customer relations and the threatening, cajoling, and manipulating of the population. Al Qaeda even provides a comparative notion of franchising. Of course, while it’s amusing to make comparisons, it’s important not to get too carried away. The serious intent here was to model and understand the dynamics of money within insurgent organizations, particularly its sources; apparently, the prime ones are kidnap for ransom, drug production, extortion, and black markets.
  • While listening, I went off on a bit of a tangent. One criticism of counter-insurgency efforts is that they help to reinforce a corrupt sitting government. This goes away, however, when one remembers that the point is not to support particular politicians, but to support a working and equitable political system. It seems this must get conflated fairly often, and for a soldier, it must be awful to think that they’re risking their lives to support a set of politicians they really dislike. Moving past that, though, it must be easier to think of the higher motives of reinforcing the institutions that enable a stable state such as, for example, legitimate democratic elections, stable succession, a lack of corruption, basic human rights, and so on. In this sense, too, while the effort starts with counter insurgency, it can’t stop there, otherwise the counter-insurgency is wasted effort.
  • Two final interesting short points
    • Apparently, to reduce drug production, it is more effective to increase the producer’s risk than it is their reduce their production
    • Someone mentioned the quote “Governments need a monopoly on violence”. Cynical, but true.
• A Simulation Model for Bloodcholesterol Dynamics and Related Disorders by Emre Demirezen, Yaman Barlas
  • Though there were several other science based models presented throughout the conference, this was by far the hardest I saw. It sought to capture the dynamics of cholesterol and other derived compounds in the metabolism of healthy and hypercholesterolemic subjects, with respect to a bunch of factors such as body weight, diet, and exercise. This is really interesting, as though a great many causal relationships between chemicals, cells, and other entities within the body are understood, we really don’t have a good understanding of the dynamics involved and the way in which all of these relationships interact to form stable equilibria. It’s obvious to me that this is one place in which system dynamics can really shine, particularly given the difficulty of understanding systems this complex using other tools.