Suggestions for Small Wars Essay Contest?

[Surferbeetle]

William F. Owen,

FM's evolve and it is instructive to compare the current offering on civil affairs to the earlier versions. Distribution is limited so access may be an issue.

With regard to models which attempt to predict reality I am currently working on a trickling filter model in microsoft excel; eckenfelder, germain, velz, nrc and their derivations all attempt to provide guidance on how to ultimately, commit resources to improve things. After everything has been programed it is fun to change the variables and note the resulting ranges of predications. I am also a fan of Isaac Asimov's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov ) idea that one day we will have quantitative models with which to predict human behavior.

So, the three block war model is a good one in that is able to provide a general concept of what is happening on certain aspects of small wars.

What other models are you aware of and would you be willing to share with the forum?

My hope is that the essay solicitation will generate some type of working/quantitative model. Along these lines I ran across a blog that is attempting to generate analysis/recommendations on weapons proliferation using collaborative efforts by the blogs visitors...perhaps that is something we could look at here

Steve

[William F. Owen]

What other models are you aware of and would you be willing to share with the forum?

Well first I would ask, why do we need to model war/conflict. I submit so as we have something that allows us to conuct operations in a better/more effective fashion.

Thus I feel we need to model opponents/actors, not the conflicts themselves. If there are no bad guys, then what are we doing?

[Surferbeetle]

William,

I agree with your assessment of models and would add that models and simulations allow us to think about things ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_%28macroeconomics%29 ) before committing resources.

Actors and opponents are certainly integral components of a conflict model. More comprehensive models involve more variables and things rapidly get painful when running these types of models. Computational Fluid Dynamics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computa...fluid_dynamics ) is an example that I am aware of that takes a look at fiercely complex issues and makes fairly decent predictions about them.

I am looking for the range of conflict models from simple to complex in hopes of learning more and suggest that the SWJ essay incorporate some of these models when attempting to advance explanations and predictions.

Steve