Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions Toward a Unified Social Framework: Workshop Summary (2011) / Chapter Skim
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8 Implications
8 Implications
Pages 83-90
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From page 83... ...
Joint Forces Command,1 poses the question, What cultural knowledge do we need in order to maximize our chances of success? 1 General Mattis was commander of the U.S.
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From page 84... ...
"He saved ten thousand lives getting food out to Baidoa and other cities," Laitin said. Another story worth hearing would be that of Mahmoud Sahnoun, a United Nations special envoy who worked with the various warring factions in an effort that might have stopped Somalia's civil war if he had received support from some of the world's powerful countries.
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From page 85... ...
His group finds core offenders by interviewing both the local police and gang members and then, once those most likely to be violent have been identified, uses proactive community policing to deter them from killing others. Hsinchun Chen offered a very different approach, employing computers to analyze close to five billion pages, files, and messages from the Dark Web in order to find terrorists and potential terrorists and determine their relationships with one another.
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From page 86... ...
Rubinstein is right when he says no, but that's an unfair question, because predicting individual behavior is an absurd requirement of any theory." What cultural models can do, however, is to point to tendencies or probabilities, and that should be the standard by which they are judged. The weakness of all of the cultural models described at the workshop, Laitin said, was that they offered no "engineering," that is, no specific recommendations for how to train soldiers to win the hearts and minds of the civilian population.
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From page 87... ...
It is the sort of tool that Kerry Patton was talking about in his presentation calling for a new discipline of sociocultural intelligence, or SOCINT. Such a discipline might help interpret practical politics in foreign countries by bringing to bear an understanding of social relationships and how the local population interprets coalitions and other political phenomena.
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From page 88... ...
Lower level officers and the noncommissioned officers are already contributing to a Wiki knowledge base with information on what works and what doesn't work in dealing with the local population, details about the local power structures and social structures, and other sociocultural information that may be useful. This is very similar to the approach that Kennedy described of using police as local experts on what is happening on the streets of Cincinnati, and it could well prove to be equally effective.
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From page 89... ...
might be an exception, Laitin said, but it is important to show not only that a model generates lots of information but also that one is actually getting more out of the model than was put into it. "If the information that you're feeding your agents is more or less what you're getting out of it, we would say there's no emergence and we're not doing much." Third, there is no evidence that models can aggregate local knowledge, at least not in a way that makes it more understandable or comprehensible to decision makers or to operations people in the field.
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From page 90... ...
"Understanding radical group dynamics, what makes them efficient, what makes them resistant to negotiations, what makes them murderous," to Laitin, seems like "areas of research that may benefit the U.S. military." Finally, Laitin repeated the words of Robert Rubinstein in his presentation on culture in cooperative relationships that trying to create some sort of general predictive model of social and cultural influence on behavior is likely to be a "fool's errand." Laitin echoed the general sentiment of several of the workshop presenters: attempts to create broad, integrated approaches to social science issues or to base practical applications on such integrated theoretical foundations are not likely to be successful.
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