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The Pre-Conflict Management Tools (PCMT) Program was developed to
transform how intelligence analysts, policy analysts, operational
planners, and decision makers interact when confronting highly
complex strategic problems. The PCMT Program capitalizes on
technologies and methods that help users collect, process, perform
analyses with large quantities of data, and employ computational
modeling and simulation methods to determine the probability and
likelihood of state failure. The Program's computational decision
aids and planning methodology help policymakers and military
planners devise activities that can mitigate the consequences of
civil war, or prevent state failure altogether. State failure has
become an increasingly important national and international
security issue since the end of the Cold War. Weak and failed
states establish a nexus of interests between global terrorism,
embattled leaders or insurgents, and large populations easily
mobilized by a combination of violent ideology and economic
opportunity. Civil war, the most common form of armed conflict
around the world, undermines regional and international stability
and catalyzes larger national security problems, such as weapons
proliferation, organized crime, and terrorism. The PCMT Program
builds on social science research on state failure and conflict, by
turning government users into consumers of social science models
employed by academic researchers and validated through peer review
processes and implementation by practitioners. By constructing an
analytic suite out of existing models, the Program avoids the
controversies of 1960's social science research programs, such as
Project Camelot, by rejecting the notion of a single,
government-sponsored theory of conflict or placing policymakers in
the position of determining what is or is not valid social science.
PCMT architecture and methodology capitalize on changes in the
landscape of information made possible by the ever-increasing
quantity and diversity of information available electronically, by
modeling, simulation, and analysis for identifying social
vulnerabilities, and by a collaborative analytic and planning
process at interagency and international levels. Each component of
the PCMT architecture incorporates or extends established tools and
practices that have improved performance in a variety of endeavors
in other domains. The PCMT data collection capability helps the
user organize and exploit all information available in electronic
form, whether collected from open sources or the user's private
databases. This enables analysts to filter data, rather than sample
from small populations of sources whose ability to represent the
character of the available universe of data is in doubt. Moreover,
automated document coding enables analysts to work from datasets
that would be too costly to construct, maintain, and manipulate
manually. As a result, PCMT data collection and management
technologies enable users to perform new kinds of analysis. The
PCMT modeling and simulation suite contains multiple models of
social vulnerabilities that assess the probability of state
failure. Each model instantiates a different social science theory
as to why states fail and civil war occurs. The suite gives
policymakers diverse perspectives on each country or region. The
application of multiple, competing models in analytic processes
also assists users in confronting uncertainty by preventing
decision makers from developing plans based on the outputs of a
single model or theory. Instead, the PCMT suite assists users in
crafting robust, adaptive policies that satisfice across landscapes
of potential futures or scenarios generated through simulation
Finally, PCMT is constructed to facilitate communication and
analysis at interagency and international levels. By giving users
warning of state failure months in advance, coalitions,
partnerships, and plans can be formed to head off a crisis.
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