What happens when you take military war-gaming technology, inject it with the latest discoveries in management, economics, and psychology, and apply it to business, political, and social situations? The answer is Simulex’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the result of ten years of research conducted at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, in association with the United States Department of Defense and several Fortune 500 companies.
What We Do
At Simulex, Inc., we use our exclusive license to SEAS to provide the next generation of consulting services to our clients in government and the private sector. Instead of experimenting with real people, SEAS allows clients to interact with synthetic people and observe what is happenin Using agent-based modeling in a business war-gaming environment, SEAS seamlessly incorporates all aspects of managerial decision making to provide a complete and integrated view of economies, industries, and organizations.
Our Goal
Our ultimate goal is to provide a totally customized product that will allow an organization to perform detailed exploration of the key issues it faces and create defined strategies that will shape its future.
Their recent press release boats “Baghdad Reduced to Bytes”—as we all know, the best way to model something is to rip it apart and see how it works. Too bad the “something” in question was a city with over four million people living inside it, right? Right.
On a hot summer day in Iraq, U.S. soldiers fight a low-intensity counterinsurgency battle on the streets of Baghdad. At 10 a.m., a truck parks near a warehouse in a crowded part of town. The truck explodes, killing the men inside and one of the soldiers standing guard.
After securing the area, the remaining soldiers sound the alarm and call for help. Onlookers gather — some cursing the bombers and others cursing the Americans for attracting the attack. Eventually, emergency responders arrive and begin to treat the wounded and quell the mob. If it had occurred in the real world, this scenario generated in a Defense Department simulation would have immediate and future repercussions in the neighborhood, the country and the Middle East.
DOD creates hundreds of similar scenarios in the largest modeling and simulation environment that the department has ever built. DOD uses the simulated environment for a set of experiments, known as Urban Resolve 2015. Those experiments are redefining the way the military operates in urban environments. Urban Resolve is also changing the way DOD develops concepts, procures technology and conducts training.
The Joint Forces Command’s experimentation directorate often brings new concepts into JFCOM training centers to benefit soon-to-be-deployed solders, said Dave Ozolek, executive director of DOD’s Joint Urban Operations Office and executive director of the Joint Futures Laboratory at JFCOM. “What you’re seeing is a glimpse of the future.”
Urban Resolve is the most important and complex experiment conducted since Millennium Challenge 2002, Ozolek said. The 2002 experiment took three years to plan and cost about $250 million. DOD developed Urban Resolve in half the time and spent about $22 million.
So who’s building the show at Purdue University’s School of Management? No idea. Their site rewards investigation, though.
http://www2.krannert.purdue.edu/
There’s a fellah named Vernon Smith who’s got an “Experimental Economics Laboratory” there, described thusly:
The Vernon Smith Experimental Economics Laboratory (VSEEL) is a state-of-the-art facility for laboratory data collection for economics, management, and other social sciences.
UR2015 is the second of three experimentation
spirals intended to investigate warfighting issues in an urban
environment. Spiral I, conducted from late FY03 to early
FY05, focused on developing situational understanding.
Spiral II (UR2015), which began in FY05 and ends in
early FY07, focuses on isolating an irregular adversary
and controlling a large urban environment. Spiral III,
scheduled for the FY06 - 08 timeframe, will focus on seizing
the initiative and controlling the operational tempo
That’s Boydspeak filtering through again, and we got a Skilluminati on John Boyd here:
Those white papers are very interesting at the Krannert School of Management, here’s an abstract:
Abstract
This paper presents a laboratory collective resistance (CR) game to study how different forms of non-binding communication among subordinates can help coordinate their collective resistance against a leader who transgresses against their rights. Contrary to the predictions of analysis based on purely self-regarding preferences, we find that non-binding communication about intended resistance increases the incidence of no transgression even in the one-shot laboratory CR game. In particular, we find that the incidence of no transgression increases from 7 percent with no communication to 16-37 percent depending on whether communication occurs before or after the leader’s transgression decision. Subordinates’ messages are different when the leaders can observe them, and the leaders also appear to use the observed messages to target specific subordinates for transgression.
Ask yourself why such a scenario would be studied and ask yourself who would fund that study.
His SEAS page has (some of?) the simulations he’s run for the military, including this gem:
August 2001: RecruitSIM: Conducted Strategic Planning Wargame for the Commanding General of US Army Recruiting Command and his Brigade Commanders at Fort Knox, Ky. During this exercise the brigade commanders investigated different recruiting strategies to meet the challenges that they will face in the future when the army transformation process in implemented.
Rough being a recruiter these days!
And it looks like the big program is called “Measured Response.” I also see he “Organized Measured Response 2004.” I’ll come back to that.
We want this one:
http://www.mgmt.purdue.edu/centers/perc/pdf/Codesign.pdf
Looks like he originally envisioned SEAS as a simulator for e-commerce.
There is some not very mathematically interesting discussion of example programs the simulated agents might follow, for instance deciding what product to purchase.
In the cites, I don’t see much interesting except that there is a much earlier paper:
“Bajaj, C., Chaturvedi, A.R., and Mehta, S.R. (1997), The SEAS Environment, Technical Report, Institute for Defense Analysis, Alexandria, VA.”
“Drug Testing Entire Cities at Once”
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city’s sewer plant.
The test wouldn’t be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country.
Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.
“It’s a community urinalysis,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a University of Washington drug abuse researcher who was part of the Oregon State team. The scientists presented their results Tuesday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
Two federal agencies have taken samples from U.S. waterways to see if drug testing a whole city is doable, but they haven’t gotten as far as the Oregon researchers.
One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.
The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field said.
Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship with the sewage plant operators.
She plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40 Oregon communities.
The science behind the testing is simple. Nearly every drug _ legal and illicit _ that people take leaves the body. That waste goes into toilets and then into wastewater treatment plants.
“Wastewater facilities are wonderful places to understand what humans consume and excrete,” Field said.
In the study presented Tuesday, one teaspoon of untreated sewage water from each of the cities was tested for 15 different drugs. Field said researchers can’t calculate how many people in a town are using drugs.
She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.
Field said her study suggests that a key tool currently used by drug abuse researchers _ self-reported drug questionnaires _ underestimates drug use.
“We have so few indicators of current use,” said Jane Maxwell of the Addiction Research Institute at the University of Texas, who wasn’t part of the study. “This could be a very interesting new indicator.”
David Murray, chief scientist for U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the idea interests his agency.
Murray said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is testing federal wastewater samples just to see if that’s a good method for monitoring drug use. But he didn’t know how many tests were conducted or where.
The EPA will “flush out the details” on testing, Benjamin Grumbles joked. The EPA assistant administrator said the agency is already looking at the problem of potential harm to rivers and lakes from legal pharmaceuticals.
The idea of testing on a citywide basis for drugs makes sense, as long as it doesn’t violate people’s privacy, said Tom Angell of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based group that wants looser drug laws.
“This seems to be less offensive than individualized testing,” he said.
This only proves to me that people need to start working in utterly unpredictable ways. Like say if all those liberal pinks decided that instead of protesting the war, which accomplishes nothing, they all joined the military and went to Iraq themselves; it would throw a major cog in the system. Because they expected the lefties to all go protest on the weekends and go back to work on monday. But if say thirty million people all joined the military and left their jobs behind how would Wall Street react? How would corporations react to huge amounts of their workers joining the army? Universities would have to start shutting down. Entire cities(San Fran, Ann Arbor, etc.) would be practically abandoned.
And if the liberals all took over the military they could run it how they wanted. Some piece of shit drill sergeant only gets to work his magic because there is always a good percentage of military recruits willing to take it. And the rest are beaten into submission. How could they do that with whole platoons of yuppie liberals all espousing love and freedom? Would they take the risk of dishonorably discharging everyone? Even if they took the steps to weed all the bad apples out it would clog up the whole bureaucratic chain of command so bad they wouldn’t be able to get shit done. And if they started sending them all out to Iraq, they could spread their beliefs of peace and the war probably wouldn’t be half as bad as it is.
This is a bad pipe dream on my part, but it’s a fun thing to imagine. I’m sure after the first million they would close recruitment down, but it would still be interesting. And it would make the policy pushers shit their pants.
Big Brother USA: Surveillance Via “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating”
The Militarization of U.S. Public Service Agencies
by Laurel Federbush
According to the 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, “the terrorist enemy now considers the US homeland a preeminent part of the global theater of combat, and so must we.”
The program of “defense transformation,” initiated by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, included, among other things, two particular concepts: “persistent surveillance” and the need to “deny the enemy sanctuary.” In military thinking, these concepts give rise to the need for constant monitoring of individuals suspected of being terrorists.
There is a special term for that: “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating.” The Defense Science Board’s 2004 Summer Study entitled Transition To and From Hostilities has a whole chapter on this, called “Identification, Location, and Tracking in Asymmetric Warfare.” “Asymmetric warfare,” incidentally, refers to war not against other countries but against unconventional enemies, such as “terrorists.” According to the first paragraph of the Study: “U.S. military forces currently have a superb capability for finding and tracking conventional war targets, such as weapons and military facilities. However, these intelligence assets have a poor capability for finding, identifying, and tracking unconventional war targets, such as individuals and insurgent or terrorist groups that operate by blending in with the larger society.”
The study suggests: “Tagging individuals and material can provide a powerful new tool for locating these modern threats. A tag is defined as something that is attached to the item to be located and/or tracked, which increases its ability to be detected or its probability of identification by a surveillance system suitably tuned to the tag. Tags can be either active (such as radio-emitting tags) or passive (such as radio frequency identification [RFID] tags).” It also says: “The technologies for tagging and associated surveillance represent a very important area for research and technology development.” The report goes so far as to recommend a “Manhattan Project"-like focus on tagging, tracking, and locating. (The Manhattan Project was the effort during World War Two to develop the first nuclear weapons.)
One organization working on tagging, tracking, and locating technologies is the Technical Support Working Group. The Technical Support Working Group, or TSWG, is funded by the Department of Defense and the Department of State, and has many divisions, all of which do research in counterterrorism technology. One of these divisions is the Surveillance, Collection, and Operations Support Subgroup. This Subgroup includes the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the FBI, the Special Operations Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. One of its projects is Tagging, Tracking, and Locating, which is sometimes referred to as “TTL.” The Secret Service, in fact, has been specifically charged by the Department of Homeland Security with spearheading the use of TTL. The subgroup also works on special sensor technologies–sensors being frequently associated with target tracking and other military surveillance applications. According to this subgroup’s own literature, its programs are “classified or highly sensitive. Program requirements, the success of programs, and specific program capabilities cannot be discussed in an open document.”
One of TSWG’s member entities, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), has been given power, under the Bush administration, to engage in counterterrorism actions all over the world. SOCOM is allowed to operate within the United States under certain circumstances. According to the SOCOM 2002 Report Layout, the Special Operations Command “is more heavily involved in Homeland Defense taskings than originally had been expected, with no let-up in sight.” The Report also observes: “...there is a tendency to suggest new roles and missions for the American military, and in particular SOF [i.e. Special Operations Forces] in the Homeland Defense realm.” The Report expressed the opinion that “care must be taken to avoid diluting SOF’s capabilities by diverting forces to domestic missions, which other agencies should be performing.” Exactly what these domestic missions are, however, is not public knowledge.
Another organization working on TTL technology is the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center–Northeast Region (NLECTC-NE). The NLECTC-NE is actually co-located with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate, in Rome, New York, which develops various kinds of surveillance technology. The fact that these two entities share a location is no coincidence; in fact, they have a partnership which includes the transfer of military technology to law enforcement.
Another radio frequency identification project being sponsored by the military and developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at least some of whose details are publicly available, is called “Total Asset Visibility,” and it calls for implantable sensors to be used in American soldiers to monitor their physiological reactions to warfare and to keep track of location. The Army Research Office’s Soldier Status Monitoring Project envisions a day when implantable sensors will enable the military to control soldiers’ physiological reactions from afar. If this kind of dehumanizing technology is being developed for American soldiers, one can only wonder what the U.S. government would be willing to do to those it labels “terrorists.”
These tracking methods are dependent on certain radio systems’ being in place.
The Integrated Wireless Network, or IWN, is a project to link the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security, and later, the Department of Defense, with one secure, interoperable communications system. “Interoperable” means, basically, that all the radio systems and other communications equipment of one department would be compatible with those of the other departments and all the personnel of these different departments could talk to each other without any technological barriers. Development of the IWN has been assigned to the military contractor General Dynamics, along with its various subcontractors. Its systems would be APCO Project 25-compliant, meaning that they would conform to a set of standards developed by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials - International (APCO) to facilitate interoperability. The Special Operations Command, it should be noted, uses APCO Project 25-compliant radios.
The complex behaviour of primates can be understood using artificially-intelligent computer ‘agents’ that mimic their actions, shows new research published in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and presented at the BA Festival of Science in York.
Scientists using agents programmed with simple instructions to work out why some primate groups are ‘despotic’ whilst others are ‘egalitarian’ - overturning previous theories developed by primatologists.
They have also found support for an existing theory of how dominant macaques make it to the safer positions at the middle of their troop without seeming to be pre-occupied with getting there.
Using agents programmed with two rules – stay in a group for safety and pester subordinates until they move away – scientists found that their more dominant agents would make their way to the centre of the group.
This desire to stay in a group and pick on subordinates could be an evolutionary mechanism that helps protect the more dominant and successful individuals in a group, they suggest.
“This kind of agent-based modelling is really a new way of doing science,” said Dr Joanna Bryson from the University of Bath who led the study and is one of the editors of the Philosophical Transactions special edition.
“Previously scientists have been limited to trying to understand animal behaviour by making observations and then developing theories that fit.
“Now we can test these theories using agents to give us a better understanding of complex behaviours.
“This work shows that agent models are an ordinary part of scientific theory building. We confirmed and extended previous work on spatial location of dominant animals, while showing where some theories got it wrong – in this case a theory put forward for why macaques form either despotic or egalitarian troops.”
Whilst there is no hierarchical structure in egalitarian groups there tends to be more fighting, although it is less violent, than in despotic groups.
Primatologists noticed that egalitarian groups tend to spend more time preening and hugging each other after fighting, leading them to speculate that the two different types of society evolved following the development of some groups’ ability to ‘reconcile’.
“Agent-based modelling techniques let us invent and remove behaviours to test the explanations of what we see in nature,” said Dr Bryson, from the University’s Department of Computer Science.
“Using modelling you can vary the external environmental factors to see if they have any effect on behaviour. You can do this for many generations in a few hours and see whether new behaviour is adaptive.”
More recent work by Dr Bryson and graduate student Hagen Lehmann has shown a new explanation for the theory they had previously overturned.
“By changing the amount of space between troop members, you can create models of despotic and egalitarian groups of agents,” said Dr Bryson.
“Then you can show that the despotic agents do better in the conditions we find despotic macaques in the wild. The same holds for egalitarian macaques
“The violence and lack of reconciliation in despotic groups comes down to the fact that they don’t like living on top of each other.
“This creates more space for the troop so they can find more food.
“But by hugging and making up after fights, the egalitarians spend more time close to each other. This makes them safer in environments where there are predators.
“This is a simple explanation for what we see in the wild, and it explains why some groups have a different range of behaviours than another.”
I’ve made experiments along these lines before, trying to blindly classify web forum users with Bayesian tools like CRM114. (moderate success, something like 75% hit rate) There was a Python project that aimed to do the same thing, but I can’t find it at the moment.
This only proves to me that people need to start working in utterly unpredictable ways. Like say if all those liberal pinks decided that instead of protesting the war, which accomplishes nothing, they all joined the military and went to Iraq themselves; it would throw a major cog in the system. Because they expected the lefties to all go protest on the weekends and go back to work on monday. But if say thirty million people all joined the military and left their jobs behind how would Wall Street react? How would corporations react to huge amounts of their workers joining the army? Universities would have to start shutting down. Entire cities(San Fran, Ann Arbor, etc.) would be practically abandoned.
And if the liberals all took over the military they could run it how they wanted. Some piece of shit drill sergeant only gets to work his magic because there is always a good percentage of military recruits willing to take it. And the rest are beaten into submission. How could they do that with whole platoons of yuppie liberals all espousing love and freedom? Would they take the risk of dishonorably discharging everyone? Even if they took the steps to weed all the bad apples out it would clog up the whole bureaucratic chain of command so bad they wouldn’t be able to get shit done. And if they started sending them all out to Iraq, they could spread their beliefs of peace and the war probably wouldn’t be half as bad as it is.
This is a bad pipe dream on my part, but it’s a fun thing to imagine. I’m sure after the first million they would close recruitment down, but it would still be interesting. And it would make the policy pushers shit their pants.
Brilliant!
Now.. to convince and see every one under that age of 30 actually doing this.. and keeping to their words of prior entry to be peaceful.. interesting.. yeeees!
The Mitre Corporation user (host: mw-128-29-43-3.mitre.org, ip: 128.29.43.3) conducted the following Google search: synthetic environments for analysis and simulation
Mitre Corporation is one of the BIG intelligence and military community cutouts, like SAIC and Battelle Memorial Institute. Tens of billions of dollars worth of tax payer money flows into these black holes each year, yet, how many Americans have ever even heard the names of these organizations?
IBM built Deep Blue to conquer the world of Chess. DARPA is building Deep Green to conquer uncertainty in the battlefield. One of the main participants in DARPA’s research effort is the USC Viterbi School’s Information Sciences Institute.
“The Deep Green program, a next-generation battle command and decision support technology, is the vision of Col. John Surdu, who manages the program for the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA.
The system interleaves anticipatory planning with adaptive execution to help the commander think ahead, identify when a plan is going awry, and prepare options, before they are needed.
Deep Green will use a human operator’s hand drawn sketches and words to induce intent. It will generate options for all sides in an operation and predict the likelihood of multiple futures.
By presenting decisions early and allowing the commander to “see the future,” Deep Green supports commander’s visualization and adaptive execution, enabling correct, timely decisions by the commander.”
Another ISI team is working on a different aspect of the same problem with their own program called Adversarial Continuous Time and Space Search:
“ACTSS represents collections of interacting combatants (units) by what are called “fluents,” a concept close to the time-space operators called vectors familiar to first year physics students.
“Fluents represent periods in which activities of the units modeled don’t conflict or interfere with each other, or complete their mission or arrive at their goal. When they do, a decision point is reached, where new vectors have to be assigned, creating new fluents.”
The science behind this approach is pretty innovative. Be sure to read the full press relase at the Vertibi School’s Web site.
A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.
The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.
The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases for the ID cards scheme and NHS patients. There will also be concern about the ability of the Government to manage a system holding billions of records. About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.
I’m going to provide a one paragraph summary, just to make sure that the implications of this are clear to everyone:
The U.S. Government has, almost certainly, established a database and tracking system for something like eight million Americans who have been designated as threats to national security. The system is called MAIN CORE and it is being run under the auspices of highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) operations. MAIN CORE uses a variety of intelligence sources as inputs, including your email, web activity, telephone and private financial information. In the event of a major national security crisis, it is alleged that Americans listed in the MAIN CORE database, “Could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”
