Reference no: EM133731711

Homework: Britain Unprepared for Poland Invasion Paper

The premise:

Your character -- feel free to choose whatever name you like -- will be teleported back in time, armed only with a laptop, software, and their brain. They arrive to find themselves as a trusted advisor to a decision maker of your choice (Axis, Allied, or other).

Take an apolitical and amoral position; you can help with energy-related decision making for any decision maker or entity discussed in the reading regardless of whether or not they were the good guys. Your character has knowledge of events covered in the reading, but no crystal ball of future events beyond the covered period.

Task

Based on the situation described in the reading, write a short statement explaining where your character arrives, how they will obtain data (you may put others to work collecting or consolidating data, but you have the only laptop in existence and your data requirements must be reasonable), how they will conduct their analysis (e.g. optimizing some decision variable, modeling and simulation to inform some decision), how long the analysis will take, who they will present their results to, and what impact their assistance is anticipated to have. Aim for between 300 and 500 words (or one-to-two pages, with 1.5 line spacing). Your objective is to creatively demonstrate that you have understood the historical situation and discerned an opportunity to improve energy-related decision-making through some type of assessment or analysis. (you get to choose how and how much) A template and model answer for the 1st homework will be provided.

Consider the following criteria:

1) Impact: Would the analysis have a decisive impact on outcomes (strategic or operational, as appropriate)? Note: if a proposal is specific to a particular campaign or operation rather than the entire war, that is OK, and we'll evaluate the impact in the context in which it was proposed. A mediocre strategic proposal will not be ranked above an excellent operational proposal.

2) Tractability: Is the proposed insight realistically obtainable from the OR technique proposed? Are assumptions about data collection reasonable? Elegantly simple but effective approaches will be valued over approaches that rely on enormous data collection or model implementation effort in order to deliver useful results.

3) Innovation: Does the proposed analysis address some obvious "low hanging fruit" or is it something that would not have occurred to most people.