DARPA Causal Exploration of Complex Operational Environments developing modelling and exploration tools for hybrid Warfare

Over the last 15 years, the U.S. military has increasingly been called upon to face complex operational environments (OE) and diverse enemies. The modern hybrid or irregular conflicts are dominated by complex human dynamics with intertwining political, territorial, economic, ethnic, and/or religious tensions. DARPA explains, “The US military increasingly operates in remote and unstable parts of the world where mission success depends heavily on cooperation with a wide variety of stakeholder groups on civil, economic, and military matters. These groups typically include host nation government organizations, local civilian groups, and non-governmental organizations, each of which has priorities, sensitivities and concerns that may differ significantly.

 

Such complex OEs require the actions of U.S. forces and host-nation or coalition partners to be based on a common holistic understanding of the OE (e.g., governments, population groups, security forces, and violent non-state actors) and, in particular, the causal dynamics that can manifest as unanticipated and often counter-intuitive outcomes. The objective of the Causal Exploration program is to develop modelling and exploration tools to aid military planners in understanding and addressing underlying causal factors that drive regional hybrid conflicts.

 

The U.S. military has a methodology to ensure that planning is adequately informed by this holistic understanding. Referred to as “Operational Design” in joint doctrine , this methodology comprises the interdependent activities of framing the operational environment, framing the problem, and developing an operational approach. Today, these activities are largely manual, and labor and time intensive. Co-located teams – equipped with whiteboards, Post-it Notes, and PowerPoint – manually assemble knowledge about the OE, generate and subjectively evaluate hypotheses about the problem/situation, and flesh out two to three options for a recommended operational approach. The selected operational approach supports the commander’s initial guidance to the planning team.

 

 

While a range of modeling and simulation tools exist within military commands, most are special-purpose and extensive time and effort are often required to configure and use these tools. Existing tools are also heavily dependent on databases with no automated mechanism for keeping them current. These tools are not generally suitable for use directly by operational planners as they require expert modelers to assemble, configure, run, and interpret the outputs.

 

The lack of time, resources, automation, and capabilities for in-depth analysis leads to less effective planning and sub-optimal outcomes of operations. The inability of planners to rapidly and effectively achieve a shared understanding of a situation/problem, systematically explore underlying causal factors driving conflict, and objectively assess potential outcomes of a broad space of actions can severely hamper the potential impact of operations. To overcome these limitations, Causal Exploration will develop, integrate, and evaluate technologies for the development, maintenance, and use of problem-tailored causal models to inform military planning.

 

DARPA said the program is working to develop “technology for analyzing data and information arising from: intelligence networks; open and other external sources; sensors and signal/image processors; and collection platforms and weapon systems,” noting that, “Technical challenges include the need to process huge volumes of diverse, incomplete, and uncertain data in tactically-relevant timeframes.”

 

“Efforts address problems related to causal modeling, automated model construction, media integrity, graph matching, biometrics-based health assessment, domain-specific search, enterprise network defense, social media analysis, and visualization,” DARPA said, pointing out that, “Operational benefits include deeper understanding of the evolving operational environment tailored to the needs of commanders at every echelon.”

 

Causal Exploration seeks to develop a modeling platform to aid military planners in understanding and addressing underlying causal factors that drive complex conflict situations. The technologies embodied in the Causal Exploration platform will enable users to rapidly create, maintain, and interact with a causal model that has been tailored for the operational environment they are facing. Interaction with the model will allow users to explore the causal dynamics driving the conflict, and gain in-depth understanding of the operational environment to support and inform their planning efforts.