NATO commanders in Afghanistan want a virtual version of the country, to test out battle plans and forecast future unrest.
Afghanistan's often-explosive mix of tribal, ethnic and religious power politics has been catching outsiders off-guard for the last couple-thousand years. This time around, America and her western allies are trying two controversial, competing approaches, to prepare for the surprises. One embeds in combat units social scientists, trained in making foreign cultures more understandable. The other dumps everything that's known about the country into a software model -- and then watches what develops in this Sim Afghanistan.
Last last week, NATO began its search for for the newest "simulation capability." This one should "be able to model the Afghanistan engagement space in the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and
Information (PMESII) domains," a call for white papers notes. With all that information in hand, war planners can then "assess and validate how specific future events or actions could impact on the current situation through the creation and simulation of a hypothetical/simulated environment."
Of course, this assumes the program is loaded with next-to-fool-proof data on Afghan economics, politics, and culture -- and understands how all those various elements interact. Not bad for a "COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] solution which may require limited development work."
Veteran counterinsurgents have long been skeptical of how accurate these models can really be. "Wait a minute, you can’t tell me who’s going to a win a football game. And now you’re going to replicate free will?" retired Lt. Col.
John Nagl, who helped write the Army's manual on defusing insurgencies, told Danger Room in 2007. "They are smoking something they shouldn't be," retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quipped to* Science* magazine. "Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.”
Still, coders and researchers at Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon University, SAIC, BAE Systems, and Purdue University have all lined up, to make similar sim societies.
White papers for these new models, NATO says, "are due no later than 25 February 2009 at 1600 hours Eastern Standard Time."
[Image: DailyGame]
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