Research for Ground Combat

ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat) is a simple multiagent-based 'toy model' of land combat design to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional top-down, reductionist approach, and represents a first step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battlefield. This model was developed as part of a recently completed project, sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, that assessed the general applicability of 'complex systems theory.' The focus of this brief is a stand-alone Mission-Fitness Landscape Mapper that uses the core engine to 'map-out' the behavior over a user-defined d-dimensional slice of ISAAC's total N-dimensional phase-space.

This paper develops a methodology for determining the characteristics of candidate small-arms rounds that satisfy a given set of military requirements. Ballistics-related information required for the methodology (and of general interest to the small-arms field) is also presented. The intended user of the methodology is the military project officer or analyst rather than the munitions developer; consequently, the approach taken is primarily operational rather than technical.

This paper briefly discusses the problems of model validation when dealing with historical data and describes the effort to validate a Tactical Warfare Simulation Program using data from the 1950-53 Korean War.