Cultural Assessment and Simulation of Military Information/Operations in Reaction and Response (CASMIRR)

In the battle to “win the hearts and minds” of civilians close to conflict, the U.S. armed services have had difficulty operating and interacting with cultures different from our own. This seems largely due to the difficulty of understanding how culture applies to a given situation, and how the Soldiers’ actions will be construed within that cultural context. To improve the quality of Soldiers’ interactions in foreign environments, we propose to create the Cultural Assessment and Simulation of Military Information/Operations in Reaction and Response (CASMIRR) system. CASMIRR is designed as a computer-based planning program comprised of a theoretical framework for cultural landscape analysis and visualization software. These will combine to enable users to create simulated population representations that can be updated with new culturally relevant information. In Phase II, CASMIRR will be integrated with a simulation modeling tool that will analyze different courses of actions, identify key players within the simulated social network, identify intelligence deficiencies, and recommend plans for future data collections to augment the cultural landscape analysis and visualization capabilities developed in Phase I.