" Conventional forces absorb the preponderance of America's defense spending. Further, most experts believe the most likely path to nuclear war is through a failure of conventional defense. It is therefore critical that conventional military balances be assessed rigorously--by techniques that go beyond the familiar static comparison of opposing military inventories and explicitly represent warfare's dynamic factors. For decades, a single set of tools has dominated the dynamic analysis of conventional balances: the ...
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" Conventional forces absorb the preponderance of America's defense spending. Further, most experts believe the most likely path to nuclear war is through a failure of conventional defense. It is therefore critical that conventional military balances be assessed rigorously--by techniques that go beyond the familiar static comparison of opposing military inventories and explicitly represent warfare's dynamic factors. For decades, a single set of tools has dominated the dynamic analysis of conventional balances: the Lanchester equations, named for their inventor, Frederick William Lanchester. In this study, Joshua M. Epstein makes two separate contributions. He argues that Lanchester's equations fail to capture the basic dynamics of warfare and that they offer a fundamentally implausible picture of combat. He also presents new, alternative equations of his own. These, he contends, do capture warfare's essential dynamics, which Lanchester theory is incapable of representing. Epstein's methods are of immediate practical relevance in assessing the requirements of defense in the specific contingencies for which the United States and its allies must plan and in setting defense priorities accordingly. "
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Seller's Description:
Good. Cover has some wear and soiling. viii, 31, [1] p. Formulae. Occasional footnotes. Table. This is one of the Studies in Defense Policy. From Wikipedia: "Joshua M. Epstein, Ph.D., is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in the departments of Applied Mathematics, Economics, Biostatistics, International Health, and Environmental Health Sciences and the Director of the JHU Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. He is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and was recently appointed to the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Identifying and Prioritizing New Preventive Vaccines. Epstein was born in New York City and grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. at Amherst College in 1976 and earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1981. Early in his career, Epstein was Senior Fellow in Economic Studies and Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution. He is a pioneer in agent-based computational modeling of biomedical and social dynamics. He has authored or co-authored several books, including Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, with Robert Axtell (MIT Press/Brookings Institution); Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology, and Social Science (Addison-Wesley), and Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton University Press). In 2008, he received an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, and in 2010 an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Amherst College. In Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up, Epstein and Axtell developed the first large scale agent-based computational model, the Sugarscape, to explore the role of social phenomenon such as seasonal migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, and transmission of disease and even culture. He has published widely in the modeling area, including recent articles on the dynamics of civil violence, the demography of the Anasazi (both in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and the epidemiology of smallpox (in the American Journal of Epidemiology). In his latest book Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling he explores the role of agent based models in the generative sciences. From 1987 to 2010, Epstein was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and served as the director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics He has taught computational and mathematical modeling at Princeton University and the Santa Fe Institute Summer School. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Editorial Boards of the journal Complexity, and of the Princeton University Press Studies in Complexity book series."
