Is the Contested Urban Networked Littoral Environment a Step too far for Agent-Based-Modelling?

The broad Defence problem addressed by our current work is, how do we handle the expansion of our modelling requirements to deal with violent conflict in contested urban environments (CUE)? Guidance regarding the relevance of the CUE from the upper echelons of Defence with Chief of Army endorsement, can be found in the Modernisation and Strategic Planning Division Staff’s Future Land Warfare Report (FLWR) (MSPD-Staff, 2014), and in Kilcullen’s (2014) “The Australian Army in the Urban Networked Littoral”. Both echo a similar message that future military operations are most likely to be held in highly networked littoral CUE, where the degree of complexity of such environments is far beyond that of conventional force-on-force engagement. With regard to the operating environment FLWR (MSPD-Staff, 2014) indicates that the environment for future operations has five meta-trends; crowded, connected, lethal, collective, constrained. The term ‘crowded’ encompasses a range of factors that interplay to create complex human, informational and urban physical terrain, including urbanisation, rural to urban migration, population growth, resource scarcity and environmental and regional political instability. The term ‘connected’ refers to the flattening effect of the interconnected global economic, social and communications systems. It is Kilcullen’s (2014) seminal observation, that the central novel feature is the highly networked nature of the urban world, which encompasses complex flow systems of trade, people, idea-systems, information with competition for not only territory, consisting of the natural land and built environs, but the built environment services such as, water, electricity, transportation, communication and the like. The competition does not, however, stop there; it is also a competition for idea-systems in what some have called the “battle for ideas” (Clarke, 2004). Many interrelated factors contribute toward population movements toward littoral mega-cities, upon whose physical terrain, exist turbulent seas of complex flowing dynamic topologies which we term the human-terrain. This discussion paper attempts to start an exploration of the issues involved in studying violent conflict in the uncertain complex CUE. A small multi-disciplinary-team has been formed within LD and JOAD with an initial focus on the Knowledge Representation (KR) of littoral urban environments for highly networked actors within an Agent Based Model (ABM) and other simulations. We suggest, based on previous work of Johnson and Ivancevic (2013; 2015), two psychological constructs which may well be applicable to ABM for either beauty of KR or computational efficiency. The current work is being conducted as a horizon survey within the frame of unbounded systems thinking (UST) due to Mitroff and Linstone (1993). With regard to world views, in addition to the traditional perspective of science/technology, the Technical T perspective, two other perspectives are taken into account in deciding what action to take next. They are the Organisational O perspective of the social-entity and the Personal P perspective of the self/individuation. It is a challenging approach in which everything is connected to everything and none of the sciences or professions involved in a study is considered fundamental. Against this frame the sociological stance is considered at some length and seven basic aspects of sociological theory are introduced (Macionis and Gerber, 2010); culture, society, socialisation, social interaction in everyday life, groups and organisations, sexuality and society and finally deviance. We recommend that in highly networked urban environment that the sociology discipline be considered for modelling social-interactions, including emotions and language, within and between various social-groups for studies of future military operations within CUE. Finally, some difficult questions, from a UST point of view, are raised for using ABMs with respect to making progress towards defence outcomes.