Generating nonverbal indicators of deception in virtual reality training

Old Dominion University (ODU) has been performing research in the area of training using virtual environments. The research involves both computer controlled agents and human participants taking part in a peacekeeping scenario whereby various skills-based tasks are trained and evaluated in a virtual environment. The scenario used is a checkpoint operation in a typical third world urban area. The trainee is presented with innocuous encounters until a slightly noticeable but highly important change surfaces and the trainee must react in an appropriate fashion or risk injury to himself or his teammate. Although the tasks are mainly skill-based, many are closely related to a judgment that the trainee must make. In fact, judgment-based tasks are becoming prevalent and are also far more difficult to train and not well understood. Of interest is an understanding of these additional constraints encountered that illicit emotional response in judgment-based military scenarios. This paper describes ongoing research in creating affective component behaviors used to convey cues for anger, nervousness, and deception in Operations Other than War (OOTW) training

UNMAS Annual Report 2020

UNMAS colleagues in the field and at Headquarters drew on their reserves of resilience and empathy to deliver life-saving programmes with innovative approaches - such as the early inclusion of COVID messaging in risk education campaigns. We relied on and deepened our partnerships. Working closely with national authorities, donors and implementing partners we managed to maintain and eventually resume operations and serve communities that live with the constant threat of explosive ordnance. Allow me to highlight some of our accomplishments of 2020: UNMAS responded to a request from the Ethiopian government to assess the threat in parts of that country, and deployed to Armenia and Azerbaijan as part of a joint United Nations mine action assessment to support humanitarian responses in conflict-affected areas following hostilities in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Consistent with the Secretary-General\u27s Agenda for Disarmament, UNMAS established and led a coordinating task force on a whole-of-system approach to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The UNMAS IED Threat Mitigation Advisory Team established a mobile training team in Entebbe, which will support regional training centers and bilateral partners to conduct pre-deployment training for United Nations troop contributing countries consistent with United Nations standards. UNMAS embarked on a change management process to increase organizational accountability and effectiveness, addressing the recommendations of a 2019 Office of Internal Oversight Serivces audit, and will continue to strengthen our delivery model in 2021. Perhaps the most singular accomplishment of 2020 has been the extent to which UNMAS programmes contributed to the protection of civilians from physical harm in the face of ongoing instability and protracted conflict

Performing the Protection of Civilians Mandate: Experiences of African Military Peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Federal Republic of Somalia

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) became a central norm in international peacekeeping and often rationalizes the use of force in peace interventions. The successes, failures and ambiguities of the PoC mandate implementation were critically explored in academia and policymaking. Few studies, however, have attended to the views and experiences of uniformed peacekeepers, thus to those actors supposed to implement the PoC mandate. This report provides initial findings on peacekeepers' experiences. The findings build on 69 narrative interviews with United Nations and African Union military peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, in which we explored how military peacekeepers described and reflected upon their peacekeeping experiences and what they viewed as successes, shortcomings and challenges. The report tries to stay as close as possible to the narratives of the peacekeepers to provide readers with a glimpse into the ways peacekeepers talked about, rationalized, justified, challenged and reflected upon their deployment. We start by assessing peacekeepers' initial reaction when they received the order for the deployment to a peacekeeping mission. Second, we outline their experiences in performing the PoC mandate focussing on peacekeepers' own understanding of their roles as protectors of civilians and the challenges they described relating to civilians and differentiating them from combatants. Their role understanding is directly linked to the gendered character of peacekeeping which we discuss in a third section. Fourth, we outline how soldiers identified barriers, discussed the need to work with intermediaries and how this impacts the distribution of trust in peacekeeping before we finally show how peacekeepers thought about the request to find 'African solutions for African Problems'. Policy Recommendations Based on our findings, we propose the following recommendations for the training of future and returning peacekeepers and policy: • To foster language skills amongst peacekeepers especially when they are regularly redeploy to the same countries to improve everyday communication with and understanding of civilians. Improved language skills would not only avoid overly relying on a few interpreters or the host county's army for translation, but also create more opportunities for peacekeepers to engage with the host population to counter prejudices and attitudes of othering

COED SPORTS AS AN ‘INTEGRATION TOOL’ IN HELLENIC MILITARY HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

This study focuses on women’s integration in the military through sports, and particularly coed sports in the Hellenic Military Higher Education Institutions: 1) the Hellenic Army Academy, 2) the Hellenic Military Academy of Corps Officers, 3) the Hellenic Military Nursing Academy, 4) the Hellenic Naval Academy, and 5) the Hellenic Air Force Academy. We argue that coed sports (mixed-gender teams) can be used as an integration tool in military institutions, although research on this topic is scarce. Our study begins with a literature review on gender, the military, and sport combining a qualitative and quantitative approach to facilitate a better understanding of how women and men navigate and perceive the meaning of their mixed-gender military sport experience in the Hellenic Military Higher Education Institutions. Initially, twelve Greek women, active officers in the Armed Forces, took part in a series of semi-structured interviews. The twelve women, all high-ranking military officers today—between the ages of 25 to 49—were randomly chosen. Subsequently, a total of 120 active officers of both genders responded to the Greek version of the "Group Environment Questionnaire" (Angelonidis, 1995). From a total of 18 questions, nine were selected to examine gender integration through sport. The main research question is whether sport in the five military higher education academies/schools in Greece contributes to gender integration as perceived and understood by the 120 participants (female and male officers). The findings showed that integration is a process involving non-isolation, meaning acceptance of the gender subject (the officer cadet/military student) regardless of his/her gender into the team, as opposed to his/her exclusion, and as a result the union-unity-acceptance in a sport team of all the subjects (officer cadets of both genders). According to the results of the analysis, there is a statistically significant interaction between the variables 'joint participation of men and women in sports' and the 'integration of women' in the five Hellenic Military Higher Education Institutions. The results of this study indicate that mixed-gender military sport programs serve as a means for gender integration, unity, and cohesion. Other than strengthening physical capacity, fitness and performance, the findings confirm that coed military sport activities could prevent sexism; eliminate or reduce gender harassment, discrimination, and stereotypes; strengthen interpersonal communication/relationships and teamwork; reinforce team and social cohesion, unity, and cooperation skills. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0765/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p&gt

Closer Australia-Canada defence cooperation?

This is the third and final paper in a series commissioned for a project that ASPI has been jointly running with Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The project explores the rationale for and possible mechanisms of closer Australia–Canada defence and security cooperation in the Asia–Pacific. The paper is authored by John Blaxland. This paper examines the prospect and utility of closer defence cooperation for both Canada and Australia. It reflects on commonalities and like-mindedness, particularly as they concern regional security and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Forward-looking measures are presented for Canadian and Australian defence policymakers to capitalise on each other’s strengthsand similarities. A visionary understanding of the two countries’ shared heritage and common interests is called for, but Canada has to demonstrate how serious it is about engagement in the region. Closer bilateral engagement should be considered in three areas: bolstering regional engagement, cost-saving measures and enhancing engagement with great powers

International Aid and Urban Change

The presence of expatriate humanitarian workers in African cities is not neutral. Country capitals receive large and sudden influx of expatriates during humanitarian crises responses. This book examines the influence of this presence on the local urban ecosystem, from the building of a security discourse to the self-segregation of aid agencies in expatriate enclaves. The examples of Abidjan, Bamako, Juba and Nairobi illustrate different variants of urban change induced by the normative power of aid organisations

MODELLING & SIMULATION HYBRID WARFARE Researches, Models and Tools for Hybrid Warfare and Population Simulation

The Hybrid Warfare phenomena, which is the subject of the current research, has been framed by the work of Professor Agostino Bruzzone (University of Genoa) and Professor Erdal Cayirci (University of Stavanger), that in June 2016 created in order to inquiry the subject a dedicated Exploratory Team, which was endorsed by NATO Modelling & Simulation Group (a panel of the NATO Science & Technology organization) and established with the participation as well of the author. The author brought his personal contribution within the ET43 by introducing meaningful insights coming from the lecture of \u201cFight by the minutes: Time and the Art of War (1994)\u201d, written by Lieutenant Colonel US Army (Rtd.) Robert Leonhard; in such work, Leonhard extensively developed the concept that \u201cTime\u201d, rather than geometry of the battlefield and/or firepower, is the critical factor to tackle in military operations and by extension in Hybrid Warfare. The critical reflection about the time - both in its quantitative and qualitative dimension - in a hybrid confrontation it is addressed and studied inside SIMCJOH, a software built around challenges that imposes literally to \u201cFight by the minutes\u201d, echoing the core concept expressed in the eponymous work. Hybrid Warfare \u2013 which, by definition and purpose, aims to keep the military commitment of both aggressor and defender at the lowest - can gain enormous profit by employing a wide variety of non-military tools, turning them into a weapon, as in the case of the phenomena of \u201cweaponization of mass migrations\u201d, as it is examined in the \u201cDies Irae\u201d simulation architecture. Currently, since migration it is a very sensitive and divisive issue among the public opinions of many European countries, cynically leveraging on a humanitarian emergency caused by an exogenous, inducted migration, could result in a high level of political and social destabilization, which indeed favours the concurrent actions carried on by other hybrid tools. Other kind of disruption however, are already available in the arsenal of Hybrid Warfare, such cyber threats, information campaigns lead by troll factories for the diffusion of fake/altered news, etc. From this perspective the author examines how the TREX (Threat network simulation for REactive eXperience) simulator is able to offer insights about a hybrid scenario characterized by an intense level of social disruption, brought by cyber-attacks and systemic faking of news. Furthermore, the rising discipline of \u201cStrategic Engineering\u201d, as envisaged by Professor Agostino Bruzzone, when matched with the operational requirements to fulfil in order to counter Hybrid Threats, it brings another innovative, as much as powerful tool, into the professional luggage of the military and the civilian employed in Defence and Homeland security sectors. Hybrid is not the New War. What is new is brought by globalization paired with the transition to the information age and rising geopolitical tensions, which have put new emphasis on hybrid hostilities that manifest themselves in a contemporary way. Hybrid Warfare is a deliberate choice of an aggressor. While militarily weak nations can resort to it in order to re-balance the odds, instead military strong nations appreciate its inherent effectiveness coupled with the denial of direct responsibility, thus circumventing the rules of the International Community (IC). In order to be successful, Hybrid Warfare should consist of a highly coordinated, sapient mix of diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces (even criminal elements), cyber disruption etc. all in order to achieve effects across the entire DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. However, the owner of the strategy, i.e. the aggressor, by keeping the threshold of impunity as high as possible and decreasing the willingness of the defender, can maintain his Hybrid Warfare at a diplomatically feasible level; so the model of the capacity, willingness and threshold, as proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone and Gunneriusson (2016), remains critical to comprehend Hybrid Warfare. Its dynamicity is able to capture the evanescent, blurring line between Hybrid Warfare and Conventional Warfare. In such contest time is the critical factor: this because it is hard to foreseen for the aggressor how long he can keep up with such strategy without risking either the retaliation from the International Community or the depletion of resources across its own DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. Similar discourse affects the defender: if he isn\u2019t able to cope with Hybrid Threats (i.e. taking no action), time works against him; if he is, he can start to develop counter narrative and address physical countermeasures. However, this can lead, in the medium long period, to an unforeseen (both for the attacker and the defender) escalation into a large, conventional, armed conflict. The performance of operations that required more than kinetic effects drove the development of DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models and in turn this drive the development of Human Social Culture Behavior Modelling (HCSB), which should stand at the core of the Hybrid Warfare modelling and simulation efforts. Multi Layers models are fundamental to evaluate Strategies and Support Decisions: currently there are favourable conditions to implement models of Hybrid Warfare, such as Dies Irae, SIMCJOH and TREX, in order to further develop tools and war-games for studying new tactics, execute collective training and to support decisions making and analysis planning. The proposed approach is based on the idea to create a mosaic made by HLA interoperable simulators able to be combined as tiles to cover an extensive part of the Hybrid Warfare, giving the users an interactive and intuitive environment based on the \u201cModelling interoperable Simulation and Serious Game\u201d (MS2G) approach. From this point of view, the impressive capabilities achieved by IA-CGF in human behavior modeling to support population simulation as well as their native HLA structure, suggests to adopt them as core engine in this application field. However, it necessary to highlight that, when modelling DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT domains, the researcher has to be aware of the bias introduced by the fact that especially Political and Social \u201cscience\u201d are accompanied and built around value judgement. From this perspective, the models proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone, Guinnarson (2016) and by Balaban & Mileniczek (2018) are indeed a courageous tentative to import, into the domain of particularly poorly understood phenomena (social, politics, and to a lesser degree economics - Hartley, 2016), the mathematical and statistical instruments and the methodologies employed by the pure, hard sciences. Nevertheless, just using the instruments and the methodology of the hard sciences it is not enough to obtain the objectivity, and is such aspect the representations of Hybrid Warfare mechanics could meet their limit: this is posed by the fact that they use, as input for the equations that represents Hybrid Warfare, not physical data observed during a scientific experiment, but rather observation of the reality that assumes implicitly and explicitly a value judgment, which could lead to a biased output. Such value judgement it is subjective, and not objective like the mathematical and physical sciences; when this is not well understood and managed by the academic and the researcher, it can introduce distortions - which are unacceptable for the purpose of the Science - which could be used as well to enforce a narrative mainstream that contains a so called \u201ctruth\u201d, which lies inside the boundary of politics rather than Science. Those observations around subjectivity of social sciences vs objectivity of pure sciences, being nothing new, suggest however the need to examine the problem under a new perspective, less philosophical and more leaned toward the practical application. The suggestion that the author want make here is that the Verification and Validation process, in particular the methodology used by Professor Bruzzone in doing V&V for SIMCJOH (2016) and the one described in the Modelling & Simulation User Risk Methodology (MURM) developed by Pandolfini, Youngblood et all (2018), could be applied to evaluate if there is a bias and the extent of the it, or at least making clear the value judgment adopted in developing the DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models. Such V&V research is however outside the scope of the present work, even though it is an offspring of it, and for such reason the author would like to make further inquiries on this particular subject in the future. Then, the theoretical discourse around Hybrid Warfare has been completed addressing the need to establish a new discipline, Strategic Engineering, very much necessary because of the current a political and economic environment which allocates diminishing resources to Defense and Homeland Security (at least in Europe). However, Strategic Engineering can successfully address its challenges when coupled with the understanding and the management of the fourth dimension of military and hybrid operations, Time. For the reasons above, and as elaborated by Leonhard and extensively discussed in the present work, addressing the concern posed by Time dimension is necessary for the success of any military or Hybrid confrontation. The SIMCJOH project, examined under the above perspective, proved that the simulator has the ability to address the fourth dimension of military and non-military confrontation. In operations, Time is the most critical factor during execution, and this was successfully transferred inside the simulator; as such, SIMCJOH can be viewed as a training tool and as well a dynamic generator of events for the MEL/MIL execution during any exercise. In conclusion, SIMCJOH Project successfully faces new challenging aspects, allowed to study and develop new simulation models in order to support decision makers, Commanders and their Staff. Finally, the question posed by Leonhard in terms of recognition of the importance of time management of military operations - nowadays Hybrid Conflict - has not been answered yet; however, the author believes that Modelling and Simulation tools and techniques can represent the safe \u201ctank\u201d where innovative and advanced scientific solutions can be tested, exploiting the advantage of doing it in a synthetic environment