Pentagon Plots Sim Iraq For Propaganda Tests

By Noah Shachtman
February 08, 2008 8:01:00 AM
Categories: Human Terrain, Info War
Courtesy Of: Wired.com

The Office of the Secretary of Defense is trying to figure out how to beat jihadists in the propaganda war. One tool they figure could help: a computer model of "Human, Social, and Cultural Behavior" in Middle Eastern locales. OSD isn't the first arm of the Pentagon looking to build its version of Sim Iraq. But this is the first one I've heard of that focuses in on the touchy subject of strategic communications.

The OSD's new "Human, Social, and Cultural Behavior Modeling" program is looking for ways to combine "game-based, agent-based, [or] systems dynamics" sims (and maybe even "cellular automata") into a virtual country close enough to real that it can "validate and verify interactions against real world scenarios."

By running these Sim Iraqis around, OSD hopes to get a better understand of:

how people communicate; what avenues of communication are traditionally trusted; who in that culture holds power and influence; how do tribal and trade associations interact; and where/how can societal behaviors contribute to options for stability and reduction in conflict potential.

These models are also supposed to "provide greater insight into how strategic, operational, and tactical operations may be impacted by individual and group socio-cultural dynamics."

Specifically, OSD would like the pixelated place to help with:

identify[ing] how media and information propagation affect beliefs and behavior within individuals, groups, societies, states, and regions. Additionally, proposals shall address the development of dynamic and semantic media and rumor propagation models/social network models.

And that's just for starters. When the program is over, OSD hopes, it will have "generate[d] a universal meta-language that is meaningful to the user communities and is relevant to the socio-cultural ‘space’ supported by the underlying models."

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* Can Social Science Win the War on Terror?