Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess the characteristic features of complex adaptive systems: combat forces are composed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts and are organized in a dynamic command and control network; 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 summarizes the results of a multiyear research effort aimed at exploring the applicability of complex adaptive systems theory to the study of warfare, and introduces a sophisticated multiagent-based simulation of combat called EINSTein. EINSTein – whose bottom-up, generative approach to modeling combat stands in stark contrast to the top-down, or reductionist philosophy that still underlies most conventional military models – is designed to illustrate how many aspects of land combat may be understood as self-organized, emergent phenomena. Used worldwide by the military operations research community, EINSTein has pioneered the simulation of combat on a small to medium scale by using autonomous agents to model individual behaviors and personalities rather than hardware.

Readership: Designed to be accessible at the junior/senior level and above, this book will be of interest to all students, academic and military researchers, political and physical scientists, computer game developers and gamers, military historians and decision makers, and others interested in learning about multiagent-based modeling techniques in general, and how these techniques may be applied to combat, in particular.

Updated February 2005