FRENDAK: SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENTS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY ESTIMATES PROGRAM

S.E.N.S.E. participants

Since 1998, SPP’s Peace Operations Policy Program (POPP) has been associated with the Synthetic Environments for National Security Estimates program (S.E.N.S.E.). S.E.N.S.E. trains leaders from countries that have recently emerged from civil wars and are undergoing reconstruction by staging simulation exercises structured around a fictitious country called Akrona. Originally, S.E.N.S.E. was developed by the Institute for Defense Analyses and used to train leaders from Montenegro, Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as officials from the World Bank and US Agency for International Development. Since the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) took over the program a few years ago, it has conducted trainings for Kosovar Albanians and Serbs, in 2002, and Iraqi officials in 2005 and 2005.

SPP Assistant Professor Allison Frendak-Blume, the director of POPP, has been working with S.E.N.S.E. since before she arrived at George Mason. In May 1999, she was hired to serve as a trainer for Akrona parliamentarians in the S.E.N.S.E. simulations. Two years later, she started working at SPP, and in February 2004, USIP asked her to consult as the manager and facilitator of their Iraqi training program. Her work involves teaching principles of governance and market economics to an audience familiar with a centralized government and command economy. USIP provides two days of conflict resolution training at the start of the five-day program, particularly in developing negotiating skills. The players then receive a role for the simulation. On the domestic side, one might serve as the president of Akrona, government minister, parliamentarian, head of the Akrona Central Bank, commercial bank or business executive, or member of a local nongovernmental organization; international simulation roles include World Bank, US, EU, and UN agency representatives, or executives within a transnational corporation. S.E.N.S.E. simulations can represent more than 10 post-conflict years so that players learn to gauge their goals and objectives in the short-, middle-, and long-term. Decision-making is performed without all necessary information, to approximate real-world conditions, and made urgent by deadlines. Review sessions bring the participants together to examine individual or group policies, and to think about how they impact bringing about peace and security to Akrona, or their own country.

Allison Frendak-Blume

In May of 2005, Frendak and her team—including POPP students Tia Wheeler, Yuriy Gavryliuk, Melanie Spillane, Carrie Sue Casey, Daniel Langberg, and Behzad Roohi; MAIS students Fatima Hadji and Patricia Anton; ICP student Farnoush Ahramizadeh; and SPP adjunct professor Kirk Johnson—traveled to Amman, Jordon to train a team who would carry out the S.E.N.S.E. program in Iraq. And in 2006, Frendak spent time in the Kurdish region of Iraq, where she performed follow-up training with the Iraqi S.E.N.S.E. team.

Dr. Frendak-Blume is a leading researcher in the field of peace operations and is the developer of the fifth version of the Conceptual Model of Peace Operations, a domain model capturing the functions, tasks, relationships, and organizations involved in these operations. She regularly consults with agencies such as NATO and the National Defense University to assess the performance of civilian military actors in peace operations in countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.