Advanced Combat Simulation for More Effective Anti-Terrorist Operations

Ongoing anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations in Iraq following the lightning conventional war of spring 2003 highlight the fact that war is seldom as simple or as quickly resolved as we expect-or hope-it to be. Even more importantly, they remind us that no enemy is truly beaten unless and until they accept that they are. Although the U.S. military succeeded in an impressively rapid and complete overthrow of Iraq's conventional military forces and subsequently occupied the entire country, we failed to consider, or at least to prevent, the possibility that the short conventional phase of the conflict would evolve into a prolonged guerilla-like insurgency. The objective of this solicitation is to advance the state of the art in user-friendly combat simulation software by enabling the realistic modeling of anti-terror operations. The solicitation recognizes that realistic strategy wargames can address the requirement for simulations that go beyond the historical premise of massive "force-on-force" operations by accurately modeling key elements of today's "asymmetric warfare" environment.