Cultural Awareness in Military

Cultural Awareness in Military

Introduction

Cultural awareness has played a crucial part in historical military operations. Military with gratitude and information of social and customs traditions are more successful since their awareness gives them more choices in circumstances needing rapid decisiveness. All over the past, greater Militaries were less than victorious during armed actions because of a lack of cultural awareness. Awareness towards culture is the knowing of all features of a country's social curve meaning its future, present, and past. Clear differentiations among cultures, mainly adjoining civilizing convictions, were reasons for almost every war or conflict. Additionally, intermediary nations also employed their individual social approach as rationale to interfere in overseas wars [1]. This paper discusses the importance of cultural awareness in military.

Discussion

Spencer (2010) quotes the great Chinese thinker Sun Tzu who stated, “Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time”. [2]

Cultural awareness is important for army operations. The battlefield commander must have a clear and up-to-date assessment of the enemy, his own troops, and the battlefield environment. Cultural awareness offers the base for better decision making of forces, and the support within which all actions and plans are considered. Rather than obtaining cultural awareness from a largely engineered world like the pilot does, the battlefield commander is directly imbedded in a natural and more variable world, with fewer direct indications of needed information. The intentions and activities of others may be very difficult to discern. One's own troops are generally widely dispersed. Cold and heat, noise, poor weather, fatigue, rugged terrain, and smoke are frequent tests. Enemy forces intentionally practice denial of information, misinformation, and deception that must be detected and interpreted correctly. Decision making regardless of missing, uncertain, and contradictory knowledge is widespread. [3]

Cultural Awareness

Cultural awareness denotes being familiar with individuals that people own diverse principles, distinct styles to their life, and dissimilar activities. It also denotes the identification that all persons are NOT from the same cultural conditions. [4]

Key features of the environment affect how well people are able to obtain and maintain cultural awareness, including:

Stress and workload that occur as a function of the task environment, the system interface, and the operational domain, each of which can act to decrease cultural awareness.

System complexity, including number of components, inter-relatedness of those components, and rate of change of information, affecting the capability of the person to stay in touch with needed information and to understand and project future events.

The capability of the system for providing the needed information (e.g., relevant sensors, data transmission capabilities, networking, etc.).

The design of the system interface, determining which information is available to the individual, along with the format of the displays for effectively transmitting information.

The level of automation present in the system, affecting the ability of the individual to stay “in-the-loop,” aware of what is happening and understanding what the ...