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Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess all of the
key attributes of complex adaptive systems: combat forces are
composed of many nonlinearly interacting parts and are organized in
a dynamic command-and-control hierarchy; local action, which often
appears disordered, self-organizes into long-range order; military
conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium; military
forces adapt to a changing combat environment; and there is no
master "voice" that dictates the actions of every soldier (i.e.,
battlefield action is decentralized). Nonetheless, most modern
"state of the art" military simulations ignore the self-organizing
properties of combat. This book develops the proposition that
combat is more like an interpenetration of two living, coevolving
fluids rather than an elastic collision between two hard billiard
balls. Artificial-life techniques--specifically, multiagent-based
models coupled with evolutionary learning algorithms--provide a
powerful new approach to understanding the fundamental processes of
war. The book introduces an artificial-life model of combat called
EINSTein. Recently developed at the Center for Naval Analyses, USA
by the author, EINSTein is one of the first systematic attempts to
simulate combat on a small-to-medium scale by using autonomous
agents to model individual behaviors and personalities rather than
hardware. EINSTein shows that many aspects of land combat may be
understood as self-organized, emergent phenomena resulting from the
dynamic web of interactions among coevolving agents. Thus, its
bottom-up, synthesist approach to modeling combat stands in vivid
contrast to the current top-down, reductionist approach taken
byconventional models. EINSTein is the first step toward a
complex-systems-theoretic toolbox for identifying, exploring, and
exploiting self-organized emergent patterns of behavior on the real
battlefield.
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