Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

**GatorLHA2** · 10-18-2005

Originally Posted by M. J. Dougherty

I recently watched an Art of War episode where they used a simulation of crowd behavior in a congested environment to illustrated the flow of battle at Agincourt and why the French suffered such high casualties compared to the English.

I am wondering if the same models of complex human behavior can be applied to the equally complex behavior of insurgents in a complex operational environment? Contemporary insurgent capabilities to dynamically adapt and change course make them much less predictable than conventional military forces or state actors. But f we could model certain influences (economic self interest, political attitudes, fear, Maslow's heirarchy) could we not find some variable to influence behavior.

There are ongoing attempts to do this. The problem is that these models of crowd behavior work well only for confined time-limited situations where the individuals in the model are physically restrained and only have limited choices.

In an insurgency, it is not always the direct responses of the people that matter, it is the second, third and forth order reactions between people directly and indirectly impacted by events. Current attempts to model these interactions assume that people can only react in a specific number of ways and leave no room for innovation, imagination or individual initiative. These models give the false impression that one can predict second and third order effects.

Wm. T. Sherman had it right when he made the comment about the rigid Kriegspiel style of wargaming and said that "Men are not Blocks of Wood". He knew from direct experience that you can not accurately predict how well a leader will lead or how hard a body of troops will fight nor can you predict how the cowardly or heroic actions of any one individual or small group at a crucial moment can change the course of a battle. Many Civil War board games have this random factor in the rules and provide good lessons for just how hard it was to conduct combat operations and to control units in the U.S. War of Rebellion.

You could possibly use these computer models to explore actions and reactions in a clearly defined event such as an ambush but not for the entire theater. The course of an insurgency is influenced by millions of human interactions to the second, third or more order, combined with the initiative of know leaders and the spontaneous initiative of previously unknown individuals that often arise in such situations and determine the course of the insurgency.