Curbing Innovation / 4

4 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and with it the Cold War came to a sudden and unexpectedly quiet end. The decade following that event has seen fundamental changes in the security challenges facing the allied nations. These changes signaled an end to the strange order imposed upon the world by the confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and a return to the relatively disordered world that obtained before that confrontation began. The world is not evolving in a new direction; rather, the old world of continuous hostility between nations and political systems, long suppressed by nuclear deterrence, is now coming back to its normal ante-bellum state.

But, these old hostilities between nations are likely to be significantly more lethal today than they have ever been before because, no longer controlled by nuclear deterrence, rogue nations are waiting in line to acquire the highly destructive weapons developed during the Cold War. Maintaining some semblance of civility in this new and dangerous world will therefore require new military solutions. Whatever solution we come to agree upon, it will have to include a new means of deterring man’s natural instincts for war, for the United States and its Allies can not forever effectively police a troubled world. A new way of deterrence, however, might require development of new technologies. Systems analysis should therefore be in high demand just about now when decision makers need help with choosing those new technologies from amongst the many alternatives command technology could make available to them.

Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War also ushered in a period of decline in the fortunes of systems analysis. In this chapter we point to the decline and fall of that institution and trace it back to two primary causes: the inadequacy of the Cold War scenario and the gradual rise in modeling and simulation.