According to an article in the National Defense Magazine , the simulations could predict the interactions between different cultures in harsh conditions and how they relate to each other based on religious, ethnic, economic and other factors. Rob Goff, manager of defense operations at Alion Science and Technology Corp (a company that develops simulations and models for military war games), explains in the article the difficulty of trying to program the complexity of human behavior.

A more suitable technology for simulating current conflicts is a computer model developed by Purdue University, known as the “synthetic environment for analysis and simulations.” SEAS allows researchers to try out their models or techniques in a realistically detailed environment. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence. Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex. Each has about five million individual nodes that represent entities such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines and people.

The SEAS technology originated at Purdue University a decade ago. It was funded by the Defense Department, Fortune 500 companies, the National Science Foundation, the Century Fund of the state of Indiana, and the Office of Naval Research. Originally, it was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. It was also used to model the population of the United States that is eligible for military service to help the Army recruit potential soldiers. (full article on National Defense)