Proceedings of the International Defense and Homeland Security Simulation Workshop

Abstract

Resilience has become a controlling concept in how soldiers make their decisions in the combat area. However, current assessments predominantly focus on statistical resilience assessment. This paper presents an alternative, more holistic approach that covers multiple viewpoints of soldiers' psychological resilience by utilizing a fuzzy DEMATEL model predicated upon new understanding of cause-and-effect relationships to analyse the ranking by using the problem of promoting military psychological resilience when compiled factual information manifests itself in terms of trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. We find that for assessment the proposed fuzzy-DEMATEL analysis is more "insightful," "comprehensive," and "unified" than the present approaches. With this new approach, testing causal-and-effect relationships can lead to an innovative vision of resilience promotion by (1) methodically finding relationships among dimensions that are typically evaluated separately, a portfolio of possible interventions to increase overall resilience; (2) observing connections between interpositions of resilience dimension factors, which may disclose accidental significances of resilience; and (3) finding an inclusive set of possible interventions to increase an overall psychological resilience in the military. We conclude that the proposed method may be beneficial for improving the resilience training programs.