Geo-political Ratings and Indicators for Planning System (GRIPS)

Successful long term strategic planning requires a thorough and systematic evaluation of the context, or future conditions, for the plans being developed. We propose to validate and build on the Navy's previous geo-political modeling and estimatingefforts to develop the Geo-political Ratings and Indicators for Planning System (GRIPS) to provide military planners with a consistent methodology to evaluate the long-term geo-political contexts for planning future force architecture. A centralfoundation of the GRIPS methodology will be an estimator aggregation approach that gives planners the ability to quickly and easily visualize the enormous volumes of data pertinent to military planning. GRIPS will ultimately provide automated extractionfrom data sources and systematic organization and aggregation for rapid communication and understanding of the probable future contexts. GRIPS will also apply data mining and forecasting techniques to the data gathered in order to better anticipate futuretrends at the aggregate level. The GRIPS World Geo-political Dashboard will provide planners with the ability to quickly visualize future geo-political contexts and drill into the appropriate level of detail in the planning process. The initial focus ison military planning, and we envision that the above benefits will make GRIPS an invaluable tool for the process of military planning. However, we also envision GRIPS as being useful for Homeland Defense analysts in forecasting terrorist activities bypredicting