Using open government data to predict war: A case study of data and systems challenges

•Problems with the usaspending.gov data and portal were encountered.•These problems created challenges to meeting social science research standards.•The problems related to task complexity and information quality barriers.•Instances of these barriers presented in a number of different ways.•Knowledge of open data barriers and their manifestations can improve portal design.

The ability to predict future military engagements would be a boon to combatants, contracting companies, investors, and other stakeholders. While governments may seek to conceal plans for impending conflict, they must spend large sums of money mobilizing and equipping soldiers in preparation for deployment. Thus, examining government spending patterns might yield insight into future military conflict. This article reports on an attempt to explore the possibility of using open U.S. Department of Defense (D.O.D.) contracting data to identify patterns of spending activity that can predict future military engagement. The research in this article followed a two-stage method. The first stage involved the exploration of the research question in the context of a specific case, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The second stage assessed the open government contracting data used in the research and classified data and systems problems that were encountered according to an established analytical framework for open data barriers. The analysis demonstrated that the use of U.S. D.O.D. contracting data to predict future war has promise; however, a number of problems with the data and online portal prevented the derivation of conclusive, generalizable results. These problems were related to the open data barriers of task complexity and information quality. A detailed description of how these barriers manifested and directions for overcoming them are presented.