Military

A Game Theory Approach to Battlefield Interrogations

When the smoke lifts and the dust settles after a successful assault, a special operations force is confronted with a cluttered compound to comb for evidence and a gaggle of disheveled individuals to interrogate.  The SOF raid itself may be a nearly perfected art, some may even say a thing of beauty, but site exploitation, at least as practiced, still leaves a lot to be desired.  What has made SSE (sensitive site exploitation) such a stubborn riddle to solve is the coincidence of enormous complexity and minute time windows.  In a time-span that can just as easily be measured in minutes as hours, the assault force must pore over every tiny scrap of information to determine what, if anything, is worthy of further exploitation and what is better discarded in the dirt.   In terms of materials gathered: documents, media, etc. a prevailing strategy quickly emerges: err on the side of over-collection.