James A. Dewar

Looking Backward to See Ahead

The Information Age and the Printing Press

A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises

Assumption-Based Planning

United States. Army

Arroyo Center

Jeffrey Alan Isaacson

Maren Leed

Force XXI is the Army's ongoing process to define the Army of the next century. RAND was asked to apply its Assumption-Based Planning methodology to assess its robustness into the future.

Assumption-based Planning and Force XXI

Rand Corporation

James Gillogly

Mario Leon Juncosa

Computerized combat models are known occasionally to exhibit non-monotonic behavior in the sense that adding capabilities to one of the combatants degrades rather than improves the battle outcome for that side. Using a simple combat model, this report shows that for an important class of (nonlinear) combat phenomena--reinforcement decisions based on the state of the battle--such non-monotonicities can be widespread and are related to mathematically chaotic behavior caused by the nonlinearities. Unlike other common sources of non-monotonicity, the latter makes ameliorating the non-monotonicities difficult. This report also demonstrates that larger, more complex models are not immune to these effects. The emerging understanding of these effects has serious implications for the verification of models that are to be used for comparative purposes.

Non-monotonicity, Chaos, and Combat Models

James A. Dewar

Books

Your next favorite book is out there