Joint, Defense, and Army leaders have long recognized that in order to train and prepare tomorrow’s leaders for operations exemplified by today’s hybrid and asymmetric threats, that training must go beyond the typical force-on-force paradigm and include portrayal and interaction within a more complex training environment. Delivery of the Operational Environment (OE) is a responsibility of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2. A significant challenge also exists in transforming unstructured, text-based information in the form of country studies and subject matter expert assessments into coherent, quantifiable data that can be readily consumed by Army training and analytic simulations as well as those used by other Army Modeling and Simulation communities.
This paper will explore how the non-military data associated with the factors that define the OE—i.e., political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment, and time, or PMESII-PT—can be quantified across a set of variables and distributed to a range of training and analytic simulations. The key to this process is the proposed Operational Environment Dimensional Framework (OEDF) methodology for fusing and disseminating diverse data about the human and geographic terrain. The OEDF primarily employs the Cultural Orientations Framework developed by anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn, Florence Kluckhohn, and Fred Strodtbeck. The OEDF methodology is also informed by research on Sacred Values. Finally, this paper will demonstrate how open-source PMESII-PT data about Iraq was processed using the OEDF methodology and ingested into the broad, cross-cutting Athena simulation.