High Risk Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Tool (HRREAT)

This proposal is to develop a High Risk Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Tool (HRREAT) that will provide commanders and their staff with a fully-integrated, user-friendly suite of tools for the rapid collection, management, analysis, modeling, and visualization of ethnographic data in denied areas to enhance planning and decision making activities. Ethnographic data has become highly important in counterinsurgency as well as in conventional combat planning and decisions. While there are many existing and new tools that can help military personnel rapidly gather such data even in risky and/or denied areas, the potentially available tools are not integrated into one accessible system and are not easily used by non-specialist personnel. Moreover, ethnographic analyses are most often divorced from overall planning and decision making. Our solution to these problems is to combine a number key social network, planning and decision support components that we are developing in several closely related SBIR projects with new ethnographic analysis components. This will create a customized and productized tool suite that enhances ethnographic data collection and analysis and visualization, puts the data into a planning and decision making framework, and most important can be quickly transitioned to operational users, both in the military and in commercial environments.