DYNARANK—AN OVERVIEW HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS Why History Is Relevant

Because a decision-support system for applying a multi-objective strategy such as shape, respond, and prepare now necessarily implies methods that have generally not been used by DoD decisionmakers (for a variety of good reasons related to complexity and the fuzziness of many analyses reflecting subjective judgments explicitly), it is useful to provide some background on DynaRank’s development and to emphasize that the methods it incorporates have in fact been used successfully in the past. They are not merely “academic curiosities,” but practical techniques. To use them well requires sophistication, to be sure, but DoD’s planning has often been quite sophisticated over the decades.