Navy: Let's Play "Sim Iraq"

When I mentioned the other day that the armed forces were funding all kinds of "Sim Iraq" projects, I meant it as a metaphor -- a way to describe the military's new breed of simulations of a society's cultural, political, and economic landscape.

The Navy, it turns out, has a "Sim Iraq" in mind, too. A literal one. The service has issued a call for a developers to build "a highly interactive, PC-based Human, Social and Culture Behavioral Modeling (HSCB) simulation tool to support training for military planners for handling insurgencies, small wars, and/or emergent conflicts."

*We are looking for innovative ideas that explore and harness the power of “advanced” interactive multimedia computer game technologies (e.g. "sim games”), that offer single or multi-player interaction via single computer, network or internet. The system should incorporate the best-practices of the videogame industry, including intuitive controls, story-telling, user-feedback (for performance assessment), scenario editing, and high-quality graphics & sound. *

But don't think you can just use the Unreal engine to gin up some pixelated Mesopotamia. "Although, high-quality 3-D graphics and 3-D
interaction are desirable, we will not be considering games based on first-person shooter (or equivalent) technology for this solicitation," the Navy notes. "The current solicitation is not aiming to build entertainment, but a highly accurate and advanced simulation platform."

The Navy is also looking for a second set of programs, to help commanders get a feel for the local culture in a hurry.

The aim is to better understand the socio-cultural context in which these military missions operate. What is needed is a Rapid Ethnographic Assessment program:
New models and methodologies to improve and augment the data collection efforts being undertaken in these missions. This capability will ensure that military analysts will not just collect data, but also be able to know what data matters, in order to make sense of tribal, ethnic and social class relationships, understand environmental factors (for example, the control of water in arid climates), land rights, disputes, the role of religion in everyday life, and the structure of the elites, to name but a few examples relevant to military operations. Candidate methodologies include: cognitive anthropology, social network analysis, other methodologies with a structuralist focus, linguistics, applied anthropology, development anthropology, and computational approaches. This effort will provide analysts with new capabilities for analyzing ethnographic data in ways that are informed by ethnological theory and modern anthropological approaches. A rich, scientifically sound, description of society and the relationships of the various parts of society, will be the result of rapid ethnographic assessment.

The Rapid Ethnographic Assessment program complements on-going efforts to improve data collection on culture and society. This program will provide a more comprehensive, scientifically sound framework for understanding the individual social facts that are being collected. Because all of culture is too large a concept for the limited time and funding of this effort, it is expected that the proposal writer concentrate on one, significant scenario in one, actual culture. Example: Power structure in Afghanistan, Tribal structure and political affiliation in Sudan, Humanitarian relief in Pakistan, Reconstruction in Iraq.

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ALSO:

* "Sim Iraq" Sent to Battle Zone
* *Weekly Standard *Blasts "Human Terrain"
* Pentagon Forecast: Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots
* Anthropology Association Blasts Army's "Human Terrain"
* Mapping Human Terrain "Enables the Kill Chain"?
* Pentagon Science & Technology: The Human Problem
* When Anthropologists Go to War
* When Anthropologists Go to War (Against the Military)
* When Anthropology Gets Ugly
* Report: Military Should Double Social Science Cash
* Can Social Science Win the War on Terror?