Considering culture in contemporary military interventions: Simulating the effects of actions of influence on a civilian population

Abstract

As armed conflicts of today are highly population-centric, a national or international military force deployed to enforce a peacebuilding agenda has necessarily to face a multifaceted and complex local culture. To meet such a challenging intercultural situation, soldiers nowadays implement actions of influence. These are non-kinetic operations aiming at shaping attitudes and behaviors and gain legitimacy and support. Understanding how local cultural norms and values can affect the outcome of such courses of action is of great importance if success is to be achieved, soldiers have therefore to be trained in this domain. The purpose of the SICOMORES system is to meet this need by modeling a wide range of these actions: psychological operations (PsyOps), key leader engagements (KLE) and civil-military cooperation actions (CIMIC). They are discrete events whose effects are simulated in a multilayered networked population of individual cognitive agents characterized by cultural features.