Military Operational Planning and Strategic Moves

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 1-2

3. Game Theory and the Decision-Making Process in Military Affairs

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 3-10

4. Strategies and Tactics

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 11-23

5. Conflicts as Zero-Sum Games

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 25-36

6. The Advantage of Moving First Versus a First-Mover Advantage

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 37-48

7. Irregular Warfare

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 49-58

8. Modelling Specific Aspects of COIN Operations: On the Possibility of a First Mover Advantage

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 59-79

9. The War Against the Taliban: Tactical Operations and Strategic Moves

   • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

   Pages 81-90

10. Lessons Learned

    • Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

    Pages 91-92

11. Back Matter

    Pages 93-101

    PDF

This book employs game theory to warfare and in particular to military operations. It aims at scrutinizing the validity of the two ideas that have governed the literature on war and warfighting: One is the Clausewitzian Fog of War, which suggests that he who is able to "see" through the gunsmoke and observe his opponent’s moves before he has to commit to some strategy himself, should be able to gain an advantage over that enemy; the other is the tradition of understanding military conflict as a zero-sum game. Combined, these ideas seem to imply that war always gives rise to a second-mover advantage. This book questions the validity of this presumption at the operational level of military planning. It provides a simple but rigorous game-theoretic framework in order to analyse operational alternatives for a whole range of typical conflicts Western military forces are facing, including the most recent ones such as Anti-Access/Area-Denial and supporting host nations' counterinsurgency campaigns.

• Game theory
• Decision making
• Strategic moves
• Defense economics
• Defense studies
• Military affairs
• Military operations
• Irregular warfare
• Network-centric warfare
• Warfighting
• Asymmetric conflicts
• War on terror
• Taliban
• Tactical operations
• COIN operations

• Faculty of Economics, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

  Lucía Martínez Ordóñez

Policies and ethics