Current military operations often require U.S. Soldiers to effectively collaborate with a mix of multinational civilian and military personnel to achieve desired operational goals. While the US has acknowledged the importance of SSTR through DOD Directive 3000.05, there have been repeated arguments that Soldiers are not properly prepared to successfully operate and interact within such culturally diverse environments. This may be due, in part, to a lack of effective training programs that adequately address a wide range of variables important to successful multinational collaboration in different contexts. Instead, we have been inundated with a plethora of programs that are specific to a particular culture. These programs are incapable of adapting to and addressing the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for successful operation in the range of complex, culturally diverse environments in which Soldiers often find themselves immersed.

Therefore, the purpose of the current research is to address these issues by taking a more universal approach that is not specific to a particular region of the world. Specifically, we will advance a taxonomy of cultural dimensions, focused on delineating various behavioral markers for each dimension. This taxonomy can be utilized to assess appropriate culture-specific and culture-generic social behaviors, which can in turn create a flexible training environment able to adapt to any particular cultural context. This taxonomy has been derived from an extensive review of cultural dimensions theory and taxonomies currently available in extant literature. Furthermore, this taxonomy has a corresponding methodology for effectively assessing additional cultural behaviors. Finally, we will identify how this taxonomy can effectively be incorporated into cultural competency training programs, which can then be adjusted based where a given country lies on the various cultural dimension continuums. This training will be easily updateable as our understanding of a culture changes over time.