Corey Lofdahl

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Principal research scientist / solutions architect at Leidos

One application area for social‐behavioral modeling of complex systems is military strategy and military operations. This chapter describes one such application. Although written from an American‐centric perspective, the ideas described should be easily understood by strategists across the globe.

Given the increasing complexity of the international policy environment, there are strong incentives to employ modern computation in the form of models and simulation to help analysts address and account for this complexity. While academic examples of such complex system policy models have been available for some time, they are not yet able to be u...

Since the launch of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, the amount of publicly available social network data has grown in both scale and complexity. This growth presents significant challenges to conventional network analysis methods that rely primarily on structure. In this paper, we describe a generative model that extends structure-based conne...

New automated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors and processing technologies provide access to ever increasing amounts of intelligence data. Effectively managing these technologies represents a profound system of systems challenge. In this study, we use system dynamics simulation to analyze and assess processing, exploitat...

Socio-Cultural Analysis (SCA) has evolved rapidly over the past decade as conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced the DOD to reappraise the techniques used to collect information about the populations in conflict zones. As these two major conflicts wind down, the DOD must recognize that SCA must evolve again due the changing responsibilities...

Social media has changed the information landscape for a variety of events including natural disasters, demonstrations, and violent crises. During these events, people use a variety of social media, such as Twitter, to share information with the world. Given the massive amount of data generated, it is difficult to identify the valuable information...

This paper addresses the application of computer-based tools to aid senior decision makers in a modern military environment. It is organized in three sections. First, the key features of successful computer-based solutions are presented. Past database centric efforts are reviewed and found insufficient. Second, simulation generally and System Dynam...

The inclusion of social science theories of persuasion can improve influence operators' ability to predict the effects of influence campaigns. However, providing operators with a means to use these theories in predicting target audiences' attitudes and behaviors presents several challenges. Operators often have limited time and data and may lack th...

Many important disaster response scenarios are infeasible to test because they are too disruptive, expensive, or dangerous to actually run. This creates a question: How to plan for potential disasters in the absence of empirical and actuarial data? Modelling and Simulation (M&S) provides a way to structure, quantify, and analyse potential disaster...

Senior decision makers have few tools available when implementing policy in multidisciplinary domains like Counterinsurgency (COIN) and Irregular Warfare (IW). Modeling and simulation (M&S) is offered as an appropriate analysis methodology for its ability to 1) combine contributions from multiple subject matter experts, 2) generate and analyze comp...

To foster shared battlespace awareness in Air Operations Centers supporting the Joint Forces Commander and Joint Force Air Component Commander, BAE Systems is developing a Commander's Model Integration and Simulation Toolkit (CMIST), an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for model authoring, integration, validation, and debugging. CMIST is bu...

Effects-Based Operations (EBO) consider an adversary nation as a system, which can be decomposed into (1) National Elements of Value (NEVs), (2) target systems, and (3) target sets. This approach to studying EBO is founded on the insight that the effects of an aerospace campaign, both physical and behavioral, can be understood as the dynamic behavi...

Research to date on democratization neglects the interconnections between temporal and spatial components that influence this process. This article presents research that reveals the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion in the world-system since 1946. We provide strong and consistent evidence of temporal cas...

Issues regarding trade and the environment have gained increased policy salience as highlighted by the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. Economists maintain that trade helps the environment citing numerous empirical studies that correlate international trade with increased national wealth and national wealth with cleaner nat...

We examine the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion in the world system since 1946. We find strong and consistent evidence of temporal clustering of democratic and autocratic trends, as well as strong spatial association (or autocorrelation) of democratization. The analysis uses an exploratory data approach...

In the study of international political economy, there is little discussion on how economic development affects the global environment. Yet natural degradation can be one of the most pervasive and longest lasting consequences of development. Too often these consequences are simply catalogued without sufficient consideration given to their social, p...

In the study of international political economy, there is little discussion on how economic development affects the global environment. Yet natural degradation can be one of the most pervasive and longest lasting consequences of development. Too often these consequences are simply catalogued without sufficient consideration given to their social, p...

The paper examines the relationship between defense spending and economic growth in US during 1889-1991 and Japan during 1879-1990. The impacts of defense spending on economic growth were different in each country during the last century. Impacts within each country change dramatically over time. These results suggest that the defense-growth tradeo...

A model of direct and indirect linkages between defense outlays and economic output is developed and applied to approximately 100 countries. We illustrate that there is a positive linkage between military spending programs and economic productivity in most countries of the world. In addition, we find generally positive externalities from the milita...

Countries with collapsed governance – so-called failed states – are common targets of international interventions. Not only do failed states impose enormous suffering on their own populations, often necessitating humanitarian aid and other forms of intervention, but they also constitute a key threat to world security. The National Security Strategy...

At the 19th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society held in Atlanta, Willard Fey and Ann Lam (2001) asked why system dynamicists by and large believe that the world population is limited and yet don't act on this belief on a day to day basis. Because this is a deceptively difficult question, this study addresses it from several diff...

It has long been thought that simulation could be used to design Command and Control (C2) system architectures, but simulation's benefits so far have not matched their promise. Instead Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) tools have become ascendant in the design of C2 systems, though problems remain. EAP tools break down proposed systems into th...

It has long been thought that simulation could be used to design Command and Control (C2) systems; thus far though, the benefits of simulation have not matched their promise. Instead, Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) tools have become ascendant in the design of C2 systems (e.g., Spewak 1995, Fowler 2003, Popkin 2004), but problems remain with...

The social sciences provide a rich repository of open, interesting, and unsolved questions that can benefit from the application of system dynamics (SD). After "solving" a problem, SD researchers must present their results, which is not as straightforward as it might seem. This study describes lessons learned presenting system dynamics results to a...

The question of whether trade helps or hurts the natural environment has led to a decade of dialogue between economists and environmentalists (Williams 2002). Its terms were stated concisely in the pages of Scientific American with economist Jagdish Bhagwati (1993) arguing that trade helps the environment and Herman Daly (1993) that it hurts. Its s...

ABSTRACT This research uses a political geography,perspective to examine the diffusion of democratic norms and practices across time and space. It encompasses the period since 1946, but is part of a larger project that looks back to the emrgence,of the modern,nation-state beginning with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and covers the subsequent waves...

Modern computers have made ever-increasing amounts of processing power available to senior-level decision makers, but they have also overwhelmed them with ever-increasing amounts of hard-to-understand data. Modeling and simulation addresses the data overload problem by "boiling down" data and synthesizing information at the macro-level. This capabi...

This study reviews the case of a failed high-technology product development effort, the Multi-Chip Module (MCM) project. Specifically it reviews the strategic decisions that led to the project's demise, and using simulation it constructs an alternate strategy that would have proven more successful. The difference between the two strategies centers...