Tanks Don’t Tweet: Implementing Information Warfare Simulation
(Room S320C)
28 Nov 18
9:00 AM
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9:30 AM
Information effects such as psychological operations, computer network operations and the use of media as an influence tool are of increasing importance to military users. However, current modelling and simulation environments have a limited representation of these aspects, having evolved to represent the physical environment and physical warfare effects. Human role players are often used in exercises to simulate information effects but this is expensive and does not consistently provide an accurate and detailed representation of the information environment. As a result, commanders are not currently able to deploy information warfare effects using information available training systems. Future simulations must be able to provide improved representations of operational environments including information effects such as disrupting communications or networks, spoofing messages and the use of social media for information operations purposes.
Under funding from the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Thales UK have undertaken research as part of the Synthetic Environment (SE) Tower of Excellence1 into the implementation of information warfare within simulation. In order to investigate information warfare effects, the team developed a test-bed using off-the-shelf components. The test-bed has been used to investigate a series of use cases based around information operations and media operations scenarios.
As well as discussing the experimentation and the practical consequences for integrating of information warfare into Simulation and SEs, the paper considers the implementation of Information Warfare in the context of MSaaS. The MSaaS concept, as developed within NATO Modelling and Simulation Group (NATO MSG) 136, promotes the delivery of simulation capability as services with well-defined functionality and interfaces. The results from the research shows that this approach is desirable when simulating information warfare ef