Talk:Military simulation

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Military simulation was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. Reviewed version: July 1, 2007

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An entry from Military simulation appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 30 March 2007.

Contents 1 Cleanup message 2 Material/Materiel 3 Globalise tag 4 Failed GA 4.1 Stuff and sense 5 Some thoughts on restructuring 6 Agreed

[edit] Cleanup message

Bot identified the article as needed cleanup and put the relevant maintenance tags. Please fix the identified problems. If you think the maintenance tags were put in error then just revert the bot's edits. If you have any questions please contact the bot owner.

Yours truly AlexNewArtBot 00:40, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Material/Materiel

I changed material back to materiel because I wanted the military meaning of the word, and linked it to the Wikipedia article on the same - hopefuly that should prevent further confusion ;-) EyeSerene^TALK 21:38, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Globalise tag

Tag removed - it was added without discussion on this page & the editor hasn't responded to my invitation to open said discussion. The article was written with a global perspective in mind (I'm not from the US!), but much of the available reference material is from the US - mostly I think because (1) this is where Simulation is most used, and (2) it is easier for authors to get relevant documents declassified. Of course, I'm open to any suggestions for improvement... EyeSerene^TALK 18:14, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Failed GA

Hi, I have failed this article's GA nomination on grounds of lack of citation and style of writing. At the moment the whole article reads like a brain-dump or textbook-dump on the subject rather than a well-structured encyclopedia article. That's not to say that there's not a lot of good content in the article, but its not ready for GA nomination. To explain in detail:

• Over-reliance on a single source - this is a biggie. I don't have a copy of the Allen text but the article gives the impression that its entire structure, not to mention entire paragraphs of un-cited anecdotes, are pulled directly from a text. The article needs to lose its reliance on this single source by finding its own structure and incorporating a much greater variety of sources - in particular there must be primary sources (military works on military simulation) rather than books written on the subject for mass-market civilian consumption.
• You state "Many professional analysts object to the term wargames" as an informal name for the entire genre, but then it seems to be used more formally in the spectrum diagram to refer to a specific subcategory of military simulation - I think the article text and smiluation spectrum diagram need to be brought into closer cohesion
• I would say that the lead paragraph is too short and fails to summarise the entire article as it should do.
• The whole article reads prescriptively rather than descriptively, which may be a reflection of the nature of the main source cited. ie many passages are similar in form to "Ideally military simulations should be as realistic as possible". This article as per wikipedia guidelines should not be a how-to guide for designing military simulations, but an outline of what military simulatations are, who uses them, why they are used, how they are used etc. I think to prevent this constant reference to what should be done in simulation theory, the article might be better layed out narratively, from the origin of military gaming through to modern theory and interpretation, removing the emphasis the current article has
• "Heuristic or stochastic?" - section titles should not be questions
• There is a lot of good content in the article but the entire thing needs restructuring in my opinion, the section headings are confusing, and there is no flow throughout the article. I would seriously consider restructuring as a historical narrative of origins -> development -> modern theory -> difficulties and criticisms of modern theory

Many thanks - PocklingtonDan (talk) 15:40, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stuff and sense

I added this:

"(This was true in the planning of OPERATION AI.)"

this

"which some later American models discarded.^[1]"

this

" In addition, it allowed umpires to weight the outcome, consciously or otherwise.^[2]"

this

"It also resembles simulations prepared and broadcast by ABC-TV's "Nightline".</ref>"

this

"A situation common in sophisticated civilian games.</ref>

this

"the modeller's assumptions ("rules") must adequately reflect reality, or the results will be nonsense accurate to five decimal places."

this

” Given the historical outcome, it's evident the dice were not so improbable, after all.</ref>”

this

”.Not unlike what Nicholas Palmer in Gamer's Guide to Board Wargaming called adding a fashionable fantasy touch of a "Sprouts wings" spell.</ref>”

this

”(and he almost always does), “

this

”intelligence” & “ (leadership) “ to “training, morale, and personalities come into play”

1. ^ Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War, p.140-1.
2. ^ In egregious cases, such as OPERATION AI, umpires routinely provided "friendly" forces with contact data, and called off the exercises before attrition took its toll, while for OPERATION MI]], the loss of Nagumo's carriers was ruled out after it had been achieved.

Hope it's some help. I've seen "Nightline"'s simcast, but I've no idea when it ran; it was quite a few years ago...

[edit] Some thoughts on restructuring

I agree with the GA failure. One major critique with the article is that within the NATO "military simulation" community a lot of current source materials refer to what is now commonly known as the "LVC" categories of "military simulation". "LVC" stands for Live, Virtual, and Constructive categories of simulation. "Live Simulations" generally refer to simulated scenarios with live people using real equipment (aka military exercises), but which may also include quantitative instrumented range-based data insertion or collection. "Virtual Simulations" generally refer to simulated scenarios with live people operating simulated equipment (Flight Simulators, Navy Bridge Simulators, Army Vehicle Simulators for example), in both networked and non-networked configurations. "Constructive Simulations" refer to simulated scenarios with simulated people conducting simulated behaviours. This article seems predominantly concerned with one particular sub-category of military simulation, namely "Strategic Constructive Simulations", and therefore it gives me an unbalanced feel.

That subcategory however is quite often still referred to as "wargaming", especially when it refers to the sub-sub category of constuctive simulations that rely on stochastic attrition models. So, the objection to the "wargaming" label cited within the article may not even be due to some sort of professional critique or recent political correctness ("war is not a game"), but rather the more recent and continuing situation that there are few actively used military simulations in this narrow category. The "military simulation" field has drastically changed since the dawn of low-cost computers to include all of the above categories, along with several detailed sub-types. In my opinion, the article does not represent the current situation regarding "military simulation" very well, and would probably require a major refactoring to bring such a structure into it, in a meaningful way. Given the article's current length, I'm not confident or energetic enough to be bold and go at it, but there's my 300 words worth about the topic if someone wants to pursue that approach.

ThreePD 00:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Agreed

I fully agree with all the above comments ;) A major restructure/rewrite is on my to-do list, but if anyone wants to jump in... EyeSerene^TALK 13:04, 26 August 2007 (UTC)