Applying Cultural and Psychological Parameters for Human Behavior Modeling in Command and Control Modeling and Simulation Systems

摘要

People have always been the most precious resource in the military. Not only because they represent human lives, but because they are still the best assets on the complex battlefield to synthesize information and make decisions that involve complex trades amongst competing objectives. Additionally, people are flexible and can adapt to novel situations allowing their creativity and imagination to maximize force effectiveness in the demanding and chaotic environment of war. In no place is the value of the human in combat more apparent than in command and control (C2) where humans are called upon to direct the flow of information and resources to best achieve military objectives. And, not surprisingly, these human roles are amongst the most complex to train and, as such, humans with C2 skills are amongst the scarcest of all military commodities. Over the past 25 years, the use of modeling and simulation (M&S) for training and analysis has steadily increased. However, the constraint on performing exercises at higher echelons is largely limited by the logistics and resources required to get all the participants together within the same synthetic battlespace and to have the individual effects of each echelon accurately portrayed in that environment. Without a critical mass of humans or realistic computational models of the humans, the validity of an exercise for training will be limited by several factors. First, commanders must have the ability to explore alternative battlefield strategies and the effects of these strategies on human response and ensuing battle outcome. Second, any C2 structure in a synthetic battlespace needs a realistic representation of the other C2 nodes to get a realistic interplay between command decision makers. Finally true "realism" demands that simulated opposing forces (OPFOR) must accurately represent their cultural/societal nuances and belief structures. Many exercises make use of U.S. Forces personnel playing the roles of OPFOR; however, this situation introduces biases on how that role player actually thinks versus what the genuine OPFOR actually thinks and consequently, would act. This aspect of realism in modeling human response in OPFOR computer-generated forces is a glaring deficiency of current U.S. simulation strategy.