Security

Darpa Wants a Lab for Sim Afghanistans

The U.S. military is bankrolling a dozen or more programs, to create Sim Afghansitans and Sim Iraqs where they can test their war plans. The problem is, each model-maker uses his own set of country-building software, his own set of data about the country’s social, cultural, and political structures — and his own theories about […]

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The U.S. military is bankrolling a dozen or more programs, to create Sim Afghansitans and Sim Iraqs where they can test their war plans. The problem is, each model-maker uses his own set of country-building software, his own set of data about the country's social, cultural, and political structures -- and his own theories about how people interact.

Darpa, the Pentagon's premiere research agency, has a fix for that. It wants to build a "social computing synthetic lab," so that all these different computer models and social science tools can actually be tested and improved. Eventually, the hope is that commanders can use this lab to help inform their decision-making.

But first, the agency is on the hunt for the basics: White papers on how to develop technologies to create these "models of complex human, social, cultural, and behavioral dynamics," how to develop a test bed for those seemingly-infinite social science theories, and how all of this could be represented on-screen.

This kind of modeling has drawn from the counterinsurgent community... well, skepticism doesn't even begin to describe it. "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."

Their minds probably won't be changed, by adding a little more rigor to the modeling process. But maybe, years down the road, these virtual countries will be credible enough to help the next generation of counterinsurgent.

[Image: DailyGame]

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