Using Complex Adaptive Systems to Simulate Information Operations at the Department of Defense

Irregular Warfare (IW), with its emphasis on social and cognitive phenomena such as population sentiment, is a major new focus of the Department of Defense (DoD). One of the most important classes of IW action is Information Operations (IO), the use of information to influence sentiment. With the DoD’s new focus on IW comes the new need to analyze and forecast the effects of IO actions on population sentiment. Analysts at the DoD traditionally use Modeling and Simulation to analyze and forecast the effects of conventional warfare’s actions on the outcome of wars, but IW and IO in particular are far more complex than conventional physics-based simulations. DoD analysts are in the early stages of looking for scientifically rigorous methods in the Modeling and Simulation of IO’s complex effects. This paper presents the state of IO modeling and simulation in the DoD, using examples from several computer models now being used, in these early stages of IW analysis. It discusses how the ideas of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and threshold events in particular may be incorporated into IO modeling in order to increase its scientific rigor, fidelity, and validity.