Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2010

Publication Title

SCS M&S Magazine

Volume

4

Issue

1

Pages

1-9

Abstract

Today's military focus has moved away from the force-on-force battlefield of the past century and into the domain of irregular warfare and its companion security, stability, transition and reconstruction missions. With that change in focus has come a need to examine the operational environment from a wider perspective, one that includes the whole range of human experiences and circumstances. As the set of factors and list of players expands, the need for reliable modeling and simulation increases, if for no other reason than to help the human decision maker make sense of this expanded decision space. However, to do this, the models and simulations must take into account the "whole of government" "whole of society" and all those with an interest in region in question- allies, trade partners, adversaries, individuals, and networks of influence. The ideal solution would be to inject models from the human sciences into our kinetic simulations and declare success, but this is not possible. The different disciplines that comprise social and human sciences have different vocabularies and interpretations of events. They understand measurement, data, and models in diverse ways and their time scales vary from those we understand from working with kinetic models. The intent of this paper is to examine some of these differences and the challenges they present both technically and managerially.

Comments

© SCS, The Society for Modeling & Simulation International.

Included with the written permission of the publisher.

Original Publication Citation

Numrich, S., & Tolk, A. (2010). Challenges for human, social, cultural, and behavioral modeling. SCS M&S Magazine, 4(1), 1-9.

ORCID

0000-0002-4201-8757 (Tolk, Andreas)

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