Why is the Dept of Defense playing economic war games?

I found this interesting, eye opening website.

SEAS is a business and economic war gaming environment developed at Purdue University in close association with the Department of Defense. SEAS replicates the "real world" in its most crucial dimensions including competition, regulation, decision variables and interaction dynamics. It consists of inter-linked goods, stocks, bonds, labor and currency markets.


In these markets two types of agents interact:

* Live: people acting as buyers, sellers, regulators, and intermediaries

* Virtual: artificially intelligent software agents that mimic human consumers in a narrow domain

www.krannert.purdue.edu...
To me, it sounds like more than a game.

They even have a live program called Info War!

SEAS LiveCases in the industries:

Info War
The purpose of the infowar game is to demonstrate the feasibility of combining quantitative and qualitative elements into a single, end-to-end distributed interactive simulation. The game was developed jointly by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University, and was based upon Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS). IDA contributed to the national security and information warfare aspects of the game, while Purdue contributed elements dealing with economic and business environments and interactions.

www.krannert.purdue.edu...

How much you wanna bet, ATS is part of this.

Want to play a game?

Maybe because Generals have nothing better to do with their time and since we are paying for it why not?

You can't seperate the economy from the battlefield. They are now and have always been bedfellows.

'An army fights on it's stomach.'

If you can completely obliterate another country with firepower, that is great. (not really)

If you can completely collapse another country's economy, that is great. (not really)

If you really want to smack them around, you need to not only keep a boot on their neck physically, you need to make sure they can't afford new neck protectors.

It disturbs me that they make all of these high powered simulations and then call them 'games.'

I really think it's just a little reinforcement in the apllicability of the golden rule. "he who has the gold, makes the rules."

The following may or may not come across as a little bit unorthodox, but I have many reasons and experiences for believing it to be true. It is a bit abstract, but very logical.

Yes, the game is easily simulated. I am surprised I have not heard of something like this sooner. I have assumed as much, but have seen no direct evidence. Thank you. I would not worry too much if I were you. Only the current system would be modeled as of now. The system is being dissolved, and a new system will take its place. The system has reached a point at which the more it is tried to be controlled, the more it will throw the controller for a loop. There might be periods of relative success in the control of a system to maintain status quo, but any system that does not take into account the parameters and directives of the systems (individual people) within the system is doomed to fail, to eat itself. At our cores, we have idealistic notions of how things should be, so the more a system at large seeks to ignore these inner realities of its subsidiaries, the further it approaches toward its ultimate demise.

The beautiful thing is, once the system dies, people are more aware of what they really want, what they really desire, what profoundly strikes a chord as their reason for being.

I guess I am saying is that we should not worry; absolute control over us is impossible to achieve. Absolutely impossible. Yet TPTB are approaching that illusory point of categorical control and power. It does not exist. When close approaching that point, all BS dissolves, the human system resets perspective, gains access to its original modus operandi.


[edit on 1-9-2009 by orwellianunenlightenment]