The Problem of Realism in Defense Simulations

Ghamari-Tabrizi Sharon M, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

Nearly every aspect of American military practice transits through a simulation. In the 1990s, modeling and simulation (M&S) acquired a central role in individual and crew training, mission rehearsal en route to deployment, operational planning, strategic and tactical analyses, testing and evaluation, acquisitions and prototype development, and long-range future studies. With the advent of M&S in the post-cold war decade, the adequacy of the correspondence between the Pentagon's simulations and actual circumstances has been pushed sharply into focus. This project is to study the meanings of realism as they are understood by simulators in several labs and workplaces. In the course of a two-year ethnography of three primary field sites, the project will examine the meaning, function, effectiveness, and qualities of the realism in simulations or war-games. Specifically, it will investigate how their perception of realism shapes their assumptions, their design choices, and guides their interpretation of their work. Sources for the information will be technical papers, meetings, presentations, work-in-progress, and interviews. Particularly attention will be paid to the evaluation of the accomplishments of simulation realism: how they elucidate, justify and interpret the effectiveness of their products. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project teams, the project will track will how they translate, interpret tacit assumptions across the boundaries of academic disciplines, corporate cultures, and federal and individual armed service guidelines and regulations. One aim is to evolve a contingent sense of the circulation of the many kinds of capital that comprise scientific/technical/cultural work; namely, the funds, expertise, authority, alliances, as well as consensus and controversial ideas that give life to each organization. Accordingly, participants will be asked to draw a map of the specific constellation of internal and external interests and substantive research problems at their particular site. These maps will orient to the organizational culture of each locale and to the multiple allegiances with which each production site for defense simulation must necessarily engage. The research will add an ethnography of the social world of military R&D to the existing literature in science studies. Other interested readers will be new media scholars who explore distributed, interactive, and/or immersive cultures. These latter typically do not address the scientific or technical apparatus of these technologies. Moreover, among culture critics who have focused attention on the dangers to civil society of the "cyborg soldier," none have had the opportunity to spend months at a time in military laboratories and war-gaming installations for intensive observation and reflection. This research will fuse the two: providing an ethnographic study of military simulations that the simulators are eager to have, while engaging the larger literatures on new media, cyberculture, and the anthropology of technoscience. The ideas from the project will be shared with the informants through informal talks and briefings at my field sites, and through publications. Lectures on the work will be presented to the faculty and students of the three doctoral programs in the US in M&S: the Naval Post-Graduate School, the University of Central Florida, and Old Dominion University. An important part of the project is to bring military simulators into contact with scholars for face-to-face dialogue.