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Archives for December, 2013 - Page 2
Stress of Battle – Part 2 – Op Research on Urban Battles
This is the second part of my review of The stress of battle: quantifying human performance in combat by David Rowland, which is an essential piece of Operational Research on WW2 and Cold War combat operations. For this part I thought that I would focus on the lessons on urban battles. Rowland and his team used historical analysis on lots of WW2 urban battles and then compared this to a series of field trials using laser attachments to small arms and tank main armaments in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The approach was to find battles where single variables could be controlled, and then use them to work out what the effect of that variable was on outcomes. Here's an interesting table on how attacker casualties vary by odds and the density of defending machine guns. Interestingly, in successful assaults the…
Book Review – The Stress of Battle by David Rowlands (Part 1)
Not exactly a book review, more of a synopsis of a great work of Operational Research by David Rowland. The Stress of Battle: Quantifying Human Performance in Combat is the end result of years of work by David Rowland and his team at the Ministry of Defence. Rowland was the father of historical analysis as a branch of Operational Research. This particular work looks at a combination of field analysis experiments in the 1980s using lasers, well documented WW2 engagements and a handful of battles from other wars. Almost every page in it is packed with evidence or explanations of the complex methodology used to ensure that you could get controlled results from an otherwise messy and chaotic environment. If you are playing or designing wargames then this is one of the books that you absolutely must have on your…
Writing Exercise – Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch
So the second part of the online tutorial for the creative writing course (A215 from the Open University) was to take the character that I made up in the first part (the lovesick witch) and then write a dialogue scene where she met one of the other characters. I had a choice of two others, either of which would have made a good scene. I chose the bored athlete because one of the other students had already posted a meeting between the lovesick witch and the introvert adolescent. The target word count was 200 and most of it needed to be the dialogue, no more than a third to be scene setting. I sort of broke that last rule a bit, but think it still works. So here it is. Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch Walking home through the park…
Writing Exercise – Lovesick Witch
I'm in the middle of a 10 day online tutorial for A215 Creative Writing (not continuously for ten days, thankfully, but in little bits posted to the tutor group forum over a ten day period). So the first task was to create a character randomly based on two lists, one of traits/conditions and the other of occupations. Being a gamer I rolled dice to choose my combination and got 'Lovesick Witch'. So here are the 200 words (199 actually) that I wrote to show that character (the rules being that it needed to be show in third person, rather than a descriptive tell and that we needed to avoided stereotypes). Lovesick Witch Her phone still had no updates. When he’d smiled at her, she felt warm inside. She’d re-read the message asking if she wanted to meet him for coffee…
Book Review: Watching War Films With My Dad by Al Murray
Watching War Films with My Dad by Al Murray My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed reading Watching War Films With My Dad. The book plays off his fascination with military history, and that for him it stems from growing up in the 70s and 80s playing with Action Man and building Airfix kits. The thing I got from it is that Al Murray is quite different from the character that we most often see him as, the Pub Landlord. Al is a much more witty person than the Pub Landlord, which shouldn't really be a surprise if you stop and think about it. The book is a sort of autobiographical discourse on military history. It sort of argues against the fascination with it, cleverly taking us from his youth watching war films while his Dad points out…