Integrating soft factors to enhance military joint training environments The role of military forces in theatre has changed. No longer is it solely force-on-force combat operations. In many cases, the military is the only large organization available in theatre and, as such, is being called on to perform many other roles, including police security, humanitarian, economic infrastructure rebuilding, and political and diplomatic roles. To accomplish these, the military must build relationships with the local community to gain support for efforts against insurgent activities. These interactions not only create important sources of information and intelligence, but also provide other non-kinetic course of action options to resolve situations to the satisfaction of all the parties without violence. In preparation for their growing role in theatre, military personnel need to understand the dynamics of the local community – its politics, economy, and culture – in order to build these relationships. Today’s military planning and training environments have been structured to address the kinetic, or military tactics, aspects of combat, but they do not necessarily address the non-kinetic, or ‘soft’, factors associated with interacting with civilian populations.
The challenge The US Army TRADOC Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA) Modelling and Simulation (M&S) office put forth a challenge to the training industry – how do you characterize the soft factors within a simulation-based contemporary operating environment to more effectively train for joint military operations? TRISA is currently involved with other departments within the US government as part of a comprehensive Human Social Cultural Behavior (HSCB) program to develop HSCB models to use within the modelling and simulation domain for doctrine development, mission rehearsal, and training. This has become a multifaceted effort to define how these factors determine their influence on real human behavior, and establish the course of action (COA) responses that coalition forces can undertake to influence the situation.
Applying Web 2.0 techniques to intelligence data management To address this challenge, CAE’s Professional Services team in Orlando, Florida analyzed how intelligence data is collected and managed – to determine how it could be incorporated into the OneSAF Military Scenario Definition Environment (MSDE) planning process. Using opensource technologies, the team defined a data pre-processing activity that would provide a web-enabled information knowledge base (iKB) to collect and encode intelligence data and analyses, converting the data from unstructured data to structured knowledge and enabling a strategic theatre “road to war” situational awareness and support analysis for theatre intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB).
Spring/Summer 2009 Technology Developments
The iKB uses data mining and the semantic web RDF/OWL knowledge encoding techniques that are used for Web 2.0 applications with georeferencing. Through enhanced data management techniques, iKB will allow human subject matter experts (SMEs) to search intelligence data using software agents and sort through massive amounts of data on kinetic and non-kinetic factors more efficiently and effectively to create links between the data collected for better intelligence analysis and decision-making.
Strategic Focus The addition of soft factor capabilities into the entity simulation behaviors within OneSAF is one current priority of TRISA. TRISA has identified a need for a standalone analyst capability that models soft factors not just over hours and days, like the Joint Non-Kinetic Effects Model (JNEM) and OneSAF in tactical scenarios, but over weeks, months, and years in strategic theatre-level scenarios. The enhanced OneSAF environment will also be used to support the American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand (ABCA) Armies Coalition‘s joint training initiative called Allied Auroras.
iKB, a collaborative tool As a web-enabled knowledge base, the ABCA contemporary operating environment tool provides the means for SMEs to work on evolving knowledge in parallel with all of the other SMEs sharing their insights. The iKB becomes the group memory of the collaboration. As SMEs rotate assignments, the iKB acts as the persistent memory that allows new SMEs to come on line, learn, and start contributing without knowledge loss. This is essential because military rotations have enormous potential to lose lessons learned and do not provide continuity to maintain the relationships established and knowledge gained.
Feeding the training environment To support training, the iKB outputs the data into Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) standard military scenario development language (MSDL), which then can be used to develop scenarios for analysis, training, and mission rehearsal within the OneSAF MSDE as well as the HSCB for simulated exercise execution. As personnel prepare for operations, their planning and training scenarios address more than the physical aspects of combat and include the political, economic, and cultural influences when dealing with the civilian population. For more information on CAE’s development of a contemporary operating environment, please contact caeps@cae.com. CAE staff will also be presenting a paper at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC).
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