This report surveys recent research and applications of Expert Systems in the military training and simulation community. The report reviews twenty-one recent papers covering this subject. Each paper reviewed has been assigned a class which establishes the phase of development of the system or activities described. For each paper the abstract is given, followed by comments which summarize in more detail significant parameters of the activities reported. This is then followed by a listing of the specific Expert System "areas of interest" described in the paper.

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Amidst increasing academic interest in “post-human” war technologies of surveillance and targeting, my dissertation conversely examines the ramifications of militarizing human beings as cultural technologies in wartime. I claim that “local” intermediaries are hired as embodied repositories of cultural knowledge to produce the soldier as an “insider” within the warzone. I focus on Iraqi former interpreters and contractors during the 2003 Iraq War who currently work as cultural role-players in pre-deployment simulations in the United States. In a new contribution to scholarship on war, my ethnography is staged within mock Middle Eastern villages constructed by the U.S. military across the woods and deserts of America to train soldiers deploying to the Middle East. Among mock mosques and markets, Iraqi role-players train U.S. soldiers by repetitively pretending to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary, ally, or proxy soldier they enact. Employed by the U.S. military in the post 9-11 “Cultural Turn” as exemplars of their cultures but banished to the peripheries as traitors by their own countrymen, and treated as potential spies by U.S. soldiers, these wartime intermediaries negotiate complex relationships to the referent as they simulate war. In my dissertation, I investigate the epistemological and affective dimensions of this wartime trend, as wartime intermediaries embody culture for training soldiers, but not on their own terms.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2006. / Thesis Advisor(s): Aurel Croissant. "June 2006." Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-78). Also available in print.

This thesis will argue that the United States should attempt to increase its access to training opportunities in the Republic of the Philippines. In 2003, the Pentagon outlined plans which called for the realignment and transformation of U.S. forces across the globe. The planned realignment of U.S. forces in Northeast Asia necessitates access to new training areas in Southeast Asia. This thesis will identify why the United States should focus its efforts in the Philippines by identifying: 1) why U.S.-Philippine political and military relations have warmed over the past 15 years, as well as what both countries hope to gain from this positive trend; 2) how the expansion of existing, and establishment of new training opportunities in the Philippines will enhance U.S. force capabilities while also fostering the development of the AFP into a more capable, professional armed force; and 3) ways to mitigate possible fears of an increased U.S. presence in the area by focusing on the benefits which will arise from it. Ultimately, U.S. access to training area in the Philippines will add stability both to the Philippines and Southeast Asia as a whole, while simultaneously aiding in the Global War on Terror. / US Marine Corps (USMC) author.

This thesis addresses the importance of the American Civil War to nineteenth-century European military education, and its influence on British staff officer training prior to World War I. It focuses on Garnet Wolseley, a Civil War observer who eventually became Commander in Chief of the Forces of the British Army. In that position, he continued to write about the war he had observed a quarter-century earlier, and was instrumental in according the Civil War a key role in officer training. Indeed, he placed Stonewall Jackson historian G.F.R. Henderson in a key military professorship. The thesis examines Wolseley’s career and writings, as well as the extent to which the Civil War was studied at the Senior Staff College, in Camberly, after Wolseley’s influence had waned. Analysis of the curriculum from the College archives demonstrates that study of the Civil War diminished rapidly in the ten years prior to World War I.

This research considers two modes of training Army infantry officers in initial training to conduct a platoon live fire exercise. Leaders from groups that were training with the current classroom training methods were compared to leaders from groups whose training was augmented with a PC based training system known as the Rapid Decision Trainer (RDT). The RDT was developed by the US Army Research Development and Engineering Command for the purpose of aiding in the training of tactical decision making and troop leading procedures of officers in the initial levels of training to become rifle platoon leaders. The RDT allows the leader in training to run through platoon level operations prior to live execution in a simulated combat environment. The focus of the system is on leadership tasks and decision making in areas such as unit movement, internal unit communication and contingency planning, and other dismounted infantry operations. Over the past year, some Infantry Officer Basic Course platoons at Ft. Benning have used the RDT in an experimental manner. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the system is beneficial in training IOBC officers. The Army Research Institute (ARI) conducted a preliminary evaluation of the RDT in March 2005 (Beal 2005). However, no quantitative measures were used in the evaluation of the RDT, only subjective evaluations of the users. Additionally, there were no formal evaluations by the training cadre, only the users themselves. This experiment continues the work of ARI and uses qualitative and quantitative data from both users and the evaluating cadre. In this experiment, the effectiveness of the RDT was evaluated through measuring leader behaviors and personal preferences. Three measurement approaches were used; (1) quantitative performance measures of leader actions, (2) qualitative situational awareness and evaluations of inclusion in the non leader players, and (3) a qualitative evaluation of the system's usability and effectiveness by system users. Analysis reveals statistically significant findings that challenge the current norms.

Developing training scenarios that induce a trainee to utilize specific skills is one of the facets of simulation-based training that requires significant effort. Simulation-based training systems have become more complex in recent years. Because of this added complexity, the amount of effort required to generate and maintain training scenarios has increased. This thesis describes an investigation into automating the scenario generation process. The Automated Scenario Generation System (ASGS) generates expected action flow as contexts in chronological order from several events and tasks with estimated time for the entire training mission. When the training objectives and conditions are defined, the ASGS will automatically generate a scenario, with some randomization to ensure no two equivalent scenarios are identical. This makes it possible to train different groups of trainees sequentially who may have the same level or training objectives without using a single scenario repeatedly. The thesis describes the prototype ASGS and the evaluation results are described and discussed. SVSTM Desktop is used as the development infrastructure for ASGS as prototype training system.

The purpose of this research project is to examine the role of conflict resolution in training programmes for military peacekeepers. It offers a significant contribution to the conflict resolution literature by providing contemporary analysis of where further manifestations exist of the links between military peacekeeping and the academic study of conflict resolution. The thesis firstly provides a thorough analysis of where conflict resolution scholars have sought to critique and influence peacekeeping. This is mirrored by a survey of policy stemming from the United Nations (UN) in the period 1999-2010. The thesis then undertakes a survey of the role of civil-military cooperation: an area where there is obvious crossover between military peacekeeping and conflict resolution terminology. This is achieved firstly through an analysis of practitioner reports and academic research into the subject area, and secondly through a fieldwork analysis of training programmes at the UN Training School Ireland, and Royal Military Training Academy 4 Sandhurst (RMAS). The thesis goes on to provide a comprehensive examination of the role of negotiation for military peacekeepers. This examination incorporates a historical overview of negotiation in the British Army, a sampling of peacekeeping literature, and finally fieldwork observations of negotiation at RMAS. The thesis discusses how this has impacted significantly on conceptions of military peacekeepers from both the military and conflict resolution fields. The thesis adds considerably to contemporary debates over cosmopolitan forms of conflict resolution. Firstly it outlines where cosmopolitan ethics are entering into military training programmes, and how the emergence of institutionalised approaches in the UN to 'human security' and peacebuilding facilitate this. Secondly, the thesis uses Woodhouse and Ramsbotham's framework to link the emergence of cosmopolitan values in training programmes to wider structural changes at a global level.