Cultural Assessments and Simulation of Military Information/Operations in Reaction and Response (CASMIRR) Phase II

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 a lack of cultural intelligence. Specifically, the difficulty lies in understanding how culture applies to a given situation and how 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 to improve the quality of the information that Soldiers gather from their interactions with civilians. CASMIRR will enable users to collect, review, and visualize these collected data for subsequent analysis. In Phase II, CASMIRR will be integrated with a simulation modeling tool that will be able to use those collected data to analyze different courses of actions, identify key players within the simulated social network, identify intelligence deficiencies, and recommend plans for future data collections.