I got a recommendation via Amazon on a book about modeling conflict using simulation games. Obviously they know me well from my purchases. I don't think I had heard of the author before, Philip Sabin but the book looks pretty interesting:
link
Simulating War
Studying Conflict through Simulation Games
Endorsements:
‘Brilliant. Professor Sabin has produced a masterwork, one worthy to grace bookshelves that are home to Von Reisswitz's Kriegsspiel, Wells's Little Wars, Morse and Kimball's Methods of Operations Research, and Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict. If you want to learn more about the unquestionably horrible but quintessentially human activity that is War, you need to read this book. Take its lessons to heart and play or, even better, design some wargames of your own.'
Dr Peter Perla, Center for Naval Analyses, author of The Art of Wargaming.
'War is, at its roots, a competitive human activity: it is, in the final analysis more about ‘minds' than it is about ‘stuff'. In Simulating War Professor Sabin gets deep under the skin of this essential fact, and provides us with a scholarly and very useable toolkit that allows us to supplement the dry data of statistical analysis or computer simulation with the realities of human interaction and the play of Clausewitz's ‘chance'. This book provides an accessible and genuinely useful aid not only to the academic understanding of the history of warfare, but also to the very practical and current demands of military force development, of concept and courses-of-action testing, and of training. Wargaming is a neglected and misunderstood art in the modern military: this book does much to put that right, and should be on the shelf of any thinking military professional.'
Brigadier Andrew Sharpe, Head of Research in the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, UK Defence Academy
This is the sequel to Philip Sabin's acclaimed work Lost Battles which uses simulation techniques to cast new light on famous Greek and Roman land engagements through a highly innovative process of ‘comparative dynamic modelling'.
In his new book, Professor Sabin focuses on simulation techniques in their own right. He draws on the thousands of wargames which have been published over the past 50 years, and on his own 30 years of experience in designing wargames and using them to help educate both military and civilian students. Simulating War is a thorough research study of a long neglected corpus of source material and of a valuable and underrated means of understanding conflict dynamics. It sets wargaming in the context of established scholarly techniques such as mathematical modelling, operational research, game theory and role playing, and explains how it unites all of these approaches in a synergistic whole.
The book contains over 150,000 words of detailed content, plus thousands of references and dozens of colour plates and text figures. It proceeds through the following three parts:
THEORY
• Modelling War
• Accuracy vs Simplicity
• Educational Utility
• Simulation Research
