Combat models allow military analysts and leaders to analyze potential conflicts and evaluate different technologies and tactics. While there are a number of combat simulation packages available, they can be narrowly scoped and often require complex software that can be difficult to learn. As such, it is essential for military leaders and analysts to be able to develop simple combat models to analyze conflicts that are out of scope of current simulations. To address this need, a course project was implemented in a combat modeling course at the United States Military Academy to teach students this valuable skill. This project was inspired by the show "Deadliest Warrior," which modeled a fictional conflict between two temporally and/or geographically displaced fighters (e.g., a Samurai fighting a Viking). The course project required students to identify two combatants and research their lethality and survivability. After conducting this research, each student built a stochastic model in Microsoft Excel to identify the percent of runs where each combatant wins. This project reinforced numerous principles of combat modeling, forcing students to perform background research, critically analyze the two warriors, make assumptions, build a stochastic model, perform verification and validation, and analyze the results. This paper presents the assignment, examples of products produced by students, feedback from students, and a compilation of lessons learned. Generally, the feedback from students was positive with most students indicating that they enjoyed the exercise and developed a deep appreciation for the nuances of combat models. By requiring students to build simple combat models, the course project successfully taught a valuable skill that is essential for military leaders and analysts.
Keywords
EDUCATION, MODELING
Additional Keywords
Excel-based models, spreadsheet models, stochastic modeling