Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

36 Modeling Information and Gray Zone Operations

Corey Lofdahl

Systems & Technology Research, Woburn, MA, 01801, USA

Introduction

The twenty‐first century has been dominated by technology, which has led to new forms of industry, economics, national wealth, trade, and geopolitics. These advancements have also led to a host of other changes including new forms of international influence and warfare. Initially, the promise of technology in warfare, from the perspective of the nation‐state, was bright. Precision targeting and stealth weapon technology helped the United States and its allies achieve victory quickly and easily against Iraq in the first Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. But even as America celebrated its seemingly easy victory over Iraq a few short months later, technology was changing the nature of geopolitics and warfare in ways that were not obvious at the time and that would play out over decades.

Martin van Creveld (1991) wrote about an emerging style of conflict that would transform the way wars would be fought, which focused more on social and cultural rather than technical factors in the form of five questions. The first question is: by whom will war be fought? In the twentieth‐century wars of great power competition, war was fought by expanding nation‐states. In the twenty‐first century, van Creveld predicted that wars would instead be fought between nation‐states and insurgents who seek to challenge the power and legitimacy ...