Integrating Cultural Factors in Military Modeling and Simulation: Anecdotal Literature Review and Framework for Application Topic: Coalition Interoperability

Effective and efficient culture cognition in the Future Force depends heavily upon orchestrating the cultural factors and patterns of battle information into effective cultural cognition models so that the appropriate context information is brought together at the appropriate time relative to the appropriate operational issues. At the heart of this problem lies the current inability of a commander (or his designated chief of staff, operations officer, information management officer, etc.) to know in real-time (1) what cultural factors will influence the outcome of a given mission and how these factors will influence this outcome (e.g., Iraq war) and (2) which of the cultural factors (e.g., political structural, religious, socio-economic, etc.) can be used by decision makers to control rhythms of war in their favor. Obviously, there is a need to address two challenges: (1) an understanding of how socio-cultural factors are likely to influence given military strategies and (2) an understanding of how to incorporate these factors into modeling and simulation techniques in order to optimize military personnel training. This paper presents an anecdotal literature review of cultural models and a framework for incorporating cultural issues in military simulations.