The Pentagon's biggest geeks are getting ready to turn you into the ultimate social animal.
Darpa, the military research division that helped create cyberspace, now wants to master meatspace's tricky interpersonal dynamics. The program is named, innocuously enough, "Strategic Social Interaction Modules." And it "will provide warfighters with the basic human dynamics skills they need to enter into any social encounter regardless of the culture, group, or situation," according to a Darpa announcement.
"After such training," the agency adds, "soldiers will be able to approach and engage strangers in unfamiliar social environments, orient to unfamiliar patterns of behavior, recover from social mistakes, de-escalate conflict, rigorously practice transition in and out of force situations and engage in the process of discovering and adapting to previously unknown 'rules of the game' encountered in social engagements."
To our ears, that sounds an awful lot like the plot to The Game, Neil Strauss' best-selling tale of transformation from awkward writer to professional pick-up artist. The book inspired a VH1 reality show, starring "Mystery," Strauss' guru of seduction. Mystery's methods for turning virgins into lady-killers were deceptively simple: dress outrageously, memorize pickup lines and strategically put women down (especially if they're sexy).
Presumably, Darpa will take a slightly different approach in its social skills training.
It's been years since the military cognoscenti realized that the key to unconventional conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan is grokking their social and cultural networks. But gaining that understanding hasn't been easy. The Army's flagship project for mastering this material – the Human Terrain System – stumbled badly in its early years. Hundreds of people hired for the program were unqualified, according to HTS' former chief.
But while HTS relies on a relatively small number of social scientists to take Afghanistan and Iraq's pulse, hundreds of thousands of average infantrymen patrol the battlefields, often with little or no experience interacting with a foreign culture. For many troops, going to war is their first trip outside the country.
Darpa wants to aid these "young, inexperienced warfighters" by enabling them to "achieve positive outcomes during the difficult social encounters inherent in current military activities." Darpa's solution, though, is just what you'd expect from the agency that helped bring you everything from the Predator drone to the computer mouse: "an innovative computer-video training simulation for social interactions." Because interacting with actual humans? That might be just a little too nerve-wracking.
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