I wrote these papers after seeing how combat simulation models were used. To put it bluntly, the use of combat simulation models is as intellectually bankrupt -- not to say corrupt -- as any area I've ever seen. My first reaction to this cesspool was "You can't do that! Your entire argument is 'the model says X' when you know perfectly well this model has no empirical basis at all, it's just some stuff a programmer wrote down". Those of my RAND colleagues who were invested in this activity -- who were nowhere near stupid, whatever else you might think of them -- had a variety of replies, for example (I'm paraphrasing) "We're not claiming this represents reality, this is just a book-keeping exercise" or "We're just using this model to generate insights". This all took place while the Department of Defense was trying to impose some form of quality control over its simulation modeling efforts under the banner of "Verification, Validation, and Accreditation", so the first two papers here were hung on the "Validation" hook. In the first paper below (which appeared in Operations Research thanks to Hugh Miser), I packaged up all the supposed uses of bad models (i.e., excuses) that I'd heard and argued that for each such use, the proper way to validate the model for that use did not involve comparing the model to reality. (At the time, this was the utterly useless bumper-sticker definition of model validation, which nobody could ever get past.) People in the field easily detected the ferocious condemnation behind this rhetorical ploy, but people outside the field missed it completely: When I sent this first paper to David Freedman, his reaction was "Next you're going to tell me that professional wrestling is for real." For the second paper I had adult supervision in the person of Jim Dewar, and the argument became more explicit. We argued that some models could be validated in a scientific sense and others (e.g., all combat models) could not be validated. We gave criteria to distinguish the two cases, then gave an updated catalog of uses for unvalidatable (previously "bad") models and the proper way to validate each one, none of which involved comparing the model to reality. This was published as a RAND report. That got me involved with a group loosely led by Steve Bankes, who were putting a more constructive spin on a similar critique under the name "Exploratory Modeling"; the third paper below was my only contribution to this effort (it came out after I'd left RAND), and actually did get some funding from some RAND sponsors.

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