Suggestions for Small Wars Essay Contest?

[William F. Owen]

This is, IMO, woeful. It is not a spectrum of conflict. It is also inaccurate. I think the old Three Block War is simplistic, but it's more useful than this. This actually implies that there are discreet areas of operation that are distinct and clearly identifiable. However, we know this not to be true, and thus it is misleading.

..and, how does it help to think like this? What use is this type of graphic?

[SteveMetz]

This is, IMO, woeful. It is not a spectrum of conflict. It is also inaccurate. I think the old Three Block War is simplistic, but it's more useful than this. This actually implies that there are discreet areas of operation that are distinct and clearly identifiable. However, we know this not to be true, and thus it is misleading.

..and, how does it help to think like this? What use is this type of graphic?

I'm not reading it that way at all. Seems to me that all it's attempting to point out is that CA is involved in military activity all the way from war to peace, but that it's specific functions vary.

[Mike Innes]

Hi folks, just getting started here at SWC after following it for quite some time. Bear with me, I've scanned over the previous 30-odd posts in this thread, and seen nothing explicitly related to the role of terrain, broadly speaking, in small wars.

I'm pandering to my own limited expertise here, but as an outgrowth of writing about sanctuary in insurgent and terrorist thought and practice, I've been building a conceptual suite that I've come to think of as "terrain complexity".

Right, the complexity part's not complicated, it means what it means, and gets into the role of networks, complex adaptive systems, and all the "unrecognizables" and incoherence of post-cold war low intensity crises. But the terrain angle is much more convoluted. Complex terrain might be just another word for "ecologies" or "environments", but I hesitate to go that route, thinking that it could be somewhat misleading to the lay, non-security types thinking more about maritime ecosystems and sustainable forests than the problems of CT/COIN battlespace and IPB, esp. in a global context.

Terrain, in this sense, is a weave of material/physical, human/demographic, and cognitive/social threads. It gets into rural vs. urban ops, hard vs. soft COIN, domestic vs. foreign theatres of operation, policing vs. military options, etc. Its ties into processes and conditions of radicalization (historically, not just in relation to today's Iraq and Afghanistan), cross-border migrations and transnational pipelines, etc. And, I think, the notion of terrain complexity underlies, so to speak, a great many of the suggestions that've already been put forward.

Anyway, just a thought.

[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