An Underlying Model for Defeat Mechanisms
Abstract
Frequently, the goal of military action involves making one's opponent capitulate, so the study of military action includes "defeat mechanisms," or strategies for achieving capitulation. Defeat mechanisms include surprise, catastrophe, and victory by attrition. Surprise means catching an agent off-guard both psychologically and physically, catastrophe means inflicting significant damage in a short interval, and victory by attrition involves persistent damage until an agent surrenders or is destroyed. One view of defeat is that the warrior has a limited supply of psychological and physical resources, and that defeat occurs when these resources are used up. While grinding attrition undoubtedly depletes a warrior's psychological resources, other defeat mechanisms might bring about capitulation more quickly. However, it is difficult to empirically evaluate various defeat mechanisms and combinations of defeat mechanisms because modern wargaming systems model only victory by attrition. While military theorists design maneuvers explicitly to affect the psychological state of their opponents, they lack the simulation tools to evaluate these effects. A wargaming system that accurately models factors of fatigue and their effect on an agent's probability of surrender is more accurate, in a predictive and explanatory sense, than one that does not. The authors have developed a wargame simulator called Capture the Flag (CtF) and have recently added fatigue and defeat models to it. In this paper, they describe their models for fatigue and defeat. For example, their fatigue model combines parameters that affect physical and emotional fatigue along with other attributes to produce an overall measure of fatigue called "effective fatigue." Their defeat model combines effective fatigue with an agent's state to compute a probability of surrender. These models are tested on catastrophe and surprise scenarios, and the results are discussed.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA462285
Entities
People
- Brent Heeringa
- Paul R. Cohen
Organizations
- University of Massachusetts Amherst