Non-kinetic Tasks and Supporting Sociocultural Information

Abstract

In June 2011, the Engineer Research and Development Center started a research project aimed at understanding the connection between Civil Affairs (CA) tasks and the sociocultural information needed to support the conduct of those tasks. The project, called CALICO (Civil Affairs Language Informing Cultural Operations), used manual and automated content-analysis techniques to arrive at an understanding of what Army doctrine (as represented in CA training manuals) reveals about the connection between CA tasks and supporting sociocultural knowledge. One motivation for the work is the need to define CA tasks in such a way that they can be represented in a Battle Management Language (BML) that can support the production and interpretation of digital operations orders (DOOs). BMLs are at present able to support DOOs that include tasks in traditional, kinetic warfare (e.g., ATTACK, DEFEAT, TAKE, HOLD), but research is needed on the incorporation of non-kinetic tasks. The incorporation of non-kinetic tasks into a BML would enable DOOs to be constructed, issued, and interpreted for Phase 0 (Shaping) operations and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR) operations. Previous research demonstrated that non-kinetic tasks can be represented in ways consistent with BML architectures based on Lexical Functional Grammar, but research has not extended to the question of what sociocultural information is relevant to what task. CALICO analysis examines CA training texts tagged using a schema that emerged from the texts themselves rather than a taxonomy developed independently for another purpose (such as JC3IEDM). This paper describes the tagging effort as part of connecting specific non-kinetic tasks to the sociocultural knowledge that supports their execution.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2013
Accession Number
ADA591949

Entities

People

  • Chandler M. Armstrong
  • David A. Krooks

Organizations

  • Engineer Research and Development Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Battle Management
  • Battles
  • Civil Affairs
  • Command And Control
  • Department Of Defense
  • Doctrine
  • Engineers
  • Grammars
  • Information Retrieval
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Military Operations
  • Personnel Management
  • Public Administration
  • Social Sciences
  • Training

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Military and Counterinsurgency Studies.