Input–output modeling for assessing cascading effects

With the advances in modern technology military planners are increasingly being tasked with assessing the broader economic and political impacts of military actions. In this paper the authors use a classical economic model developed by Wasley Leontief to assess those impacts. The Leontief input–output model is an extremely simple yet versatile linear program that can model economies at any level from the international to local. The authors create a scenario using actual region economic data and assess the impact of various military and political actions on that region. Specifically, the economic impacts of peacekeeping, an embargo and several different attack strategies are assessed. The attack strategies used traditional conventional attack planning methodology to determine probability of damage and then apply those to determine the impact to the economy.