Abstract
Recent events have shown that today’s and future wars are/will be much different than those fought in the previous decades. Destroying the will of the people will no longer be the primary goal in such endeavors. Success will be decided by our ability to understand the local populace, provide human security, and eventually enable the country/region to govern itself and maintain security. To accomplish this, we need to understand the environment in which we are to operate in—including the local populace. The National Operational Environment Model (NOEM) is a large-scale stochastic model representing the environment of a nation-state or region along with a set of capabilities which allow one to exercise the model. The NOEM enables a user to identify potential problem regions within the environment, test a wide variety of policy options on a national or regional basis, determine suitable courses of actions given a specified set of initial conditions, and investigate resource allocation levels that will best improve overall country or regional stability. The different policy options or actions can be simulated, revealing potential unforeseen effects and general trends over time. In this chapter we explore previous work in the area of stability management, provide an overview of the NOEM, and discuss two different use cases.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the remainder members of the NOEM development team (from ITT: Chris Kies, Brian Sullivan, Roger Nestler, Andrew Allen; from CUBRIC: Jeff Spaulding) for their dedication and support. We would also like to share our appreciation with Dr. Dennis Leedom (EBR Inc.), Janet Wedgwood (Lockheed Martin) and Bob Schlicher (Oakridge National Laboratory) for their support and collaboration in performing V&V on the NOEM. This work has been partially supported by Dr Joe Lyons, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under a Laboratory Research Imitation Request (LRIR) effort.
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Salerno, J.J. et al. (2013). The NOEM: A Tool for Understanding/ Exploring the Complexities of Today’s Operational Environment. In: Subrahmanian, V. (eds) Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5311-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5311-6_17
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