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Ignoring the Innocent
Non-combatants in Urban Operations and in Military Models and Simulations
Non-combatants have become an important aspect of U.S. military operations in urban areas. Recent experience shows how non-combatants can affect the United States’ ability to meet tactical and strategic objectives in engagements across the spectrum of warfare. However, there is currently little systematic research on civilian behavior within the defense community, including the military modeling community. As the policy questions about dealing with civilians continue to gain in importance, further research on non-combatants would be beneficial. This dissertation reviews recent urban operation campaigns and attempts to provide background research that will assist in incorporating non-combatants into models, simulations, training scenarios, and other analytic tools in a more formal way. It identifies non-combatant behavior from recent urban operations that have affected U.S. military activities. It recommends a layered approach to civilian behavior, beginning with basic population density and other demographic characteristics. To this, it adds simple and then complex behaviors. This dissertation also assesses methods for modeling large numbers of non-combatants and proposes using agent-based modeling (ABM). Introducing agent-based non-combatants into existing models and simulations also has the potential to extend current force-on-force models and allow them to be used in examining urban operations. This is an important practical consideration and an alternative to waiting, possibly for years, until new urban combat models are built, tested, and formally accredited.
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Contents
Chapter One:
Introduction
Chapter Two:
Methodology and Literature Review
Chapter Three:
Case Studies
Chapter Four:
Populating Models with Non-combatants
Chapter Five:
Simple Non-combatant Behaviors
Chapter Six:
Complex Non-combatant Behaviors
Chapter Seven:
Conclusions
This document was submitted as a dissertation in March, 2006 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of James T. Quinlivan (Chair), Steven C. Bankes, Russell W. Glenn, and Randall Steeb.
This product is part of the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) dissertation series. PRGS dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertation has been supervised, reviewed, and approved by a PRGS faculty committee overseeing the dissertation.
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