Nov
9
How to evaluate National Security ?
9 novembre, 2009 | Commentaires fermés sur How to evaluate National Security ?
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) elaborated by Dr Saaty during the 70s in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is a well established decision making framework. In a near future, this kind of tool may become very useful. Indeed, most of the global problems the international community is facing are very complex. There is a real demand by decision makers and public opinion to clarify what is at stake. For example, the climate change negotiation currently under way necessitate to build a strategy and a set of norms to coordinate the energy policies of 190 countries over the next half century. This strategy will impact the standard of living of all the population, wealth or poor. It a decision situation which is very similar to the arms control regime which was build and used during the Cold War. I suggest exploring this AHP strategic tool through an exemple from the book “Strategic Decision Making” from N. Bhushan and K. Rai (Springler, 2004).
Mapping the future : which factor will be most influential on national security in the medium run
The AHP approach is a framework to structure a decision making problem. First, the analyst needs to state a goal which is a decision situation. Most of the time, it is selecting the best alternative. Then, he must establish a set of criteria on which the alternative will be selected. Finally, he will describe the set of alternatives he is focusing on. The difficult part of the process is to evaluate, with ordinal values, the alternatives and to get an order to rank them. So, a hierarchy is a decision goal, a set of criteria for the decision and a set of alternatives to evaluate. The AHP structured a strategic problem as a hierarchy of factors.The key of the AHP methodology is the use of pairwise comparison of factors. Each pair of factors are balanced all other things being equal (ceteris paribus sic stantibus). The comparison of each pair of criteria is an evaluation of the impact of one factor against the other about the decision goal. Which one will be more important and with which strength ?
For example, let us consider the National Security goal of a poor country with a worth raw material. This goal rests on the criteria : Territory integrity, Population security and Sovereignty. Our alternative is either Cooperation or Confrontation with a rich country to exploit the natural resource. Based on the following pairwise comparison of the criteria :
And the pairwise comparison of the alternatives :
The AHP give us the following result :
From the web site http://www.123ahp.com/
If we considered the national security issue from an underdeveloped country point of view. We can make the assumption that the territorial integrity is more important than population security, because of energy resource like oil. Sovereignty is the most important criteria of all from a realist point of view. Which is also the case for a lot of political elite of poor country, it means their autonomy of decision. The result from the previous evaluation is the strategy of confrontation (the alternative with much weight preference) and the ranking of criteria is sovereignty first. We are clearly in the case of two realist countries which face each other in a zero sum game and the a priori strategy which will be favor by the poor country with natural resource will be a confrontation strategy. It might not be coherent with its military capacity. More extensively, let us consider the following set of global factors impacting national security :
– The world power situation (W)
– The Commercial situation (C)
– The Technological factors (T)
– The international environmental factors (E)
– The Socio cultural factors (S)
If we ask a set of experts, for each kind of domains, what factor is the most important in shaping the future world in the medium term ? We obtain a matrix of all the preferences. The math concepts used to manipulate this matrix and compute the ranking of the factors rests on eigenvectors and eigenvalues. It is similar to a change of reference in geometry.
The AHP computation provide us with a grid to help us to evaluate the most important factors and so how evaluate the future threats on National Security
From the web site http://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/tools/ahp/index_e.asp
Which is a the grid to read the future at the beginning of this article
Qui suis-je?
Emmanuel Meneut
Analyste des Relations Internationales :
- Géopolitique et Gestion des Conflits
- Développement de la Société Civile
- Environnement et Energie
Diplômé de l'Institut Catholique de Paris - Faculté de Sciences Sociales & Economiques et de l'American University of Paris en Affaires Internationales, Sociologie des Conflits et Société Civile en 2008
Ingénieur de l'Ecole Centrale de Marseille (ex ENSPM/Sup Phy) en 1990