Archives for Iraq Wars
Babylon Falls [Flash Fiction]
An abandoned warehouse in the US (photo: lburgan via pixabay) I wrote Babylon Falls as short story for the NYC Flash Fiction Challenge round 2 back in September. The prompt was to write a horror story set in a warehouse and including a kids lunch box in under a thousand words. The premise I went with was something strange happened in Babylon in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion. Ten years on some mysterious entity is getting its revenge on some of the US troops involved in thwarting it's nefarious activities. The title is a twin clue, Babylon Falls directly referring to the capture of the site of the ancient city. It also refers to the location of the warehouse. I wasn't entirely happy with Babylon Falls at the time, which is why I didn't post it sooner. I've had…
Book Review – Zero Six Bravo by Damien Lewis
Zero Six Bravo: 60 Special Forces. 100,000 Enemy. The Explosive True Story by Damien Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I make a point of reading first hand accounts of special forces operations. I started with world war two tales of the SAS and have worked up to the present time. Since the Bravo Two Zero fiasco I don't expect much from tales of recent events. This particular book tells the tale of a Special Boat Service mission in Iraq in 2003. It suffers a bit from excessive hypebole, presumably to garner sales. However it is actually very readable, and although much of the outcome is telepgrahed in advance the way it's done is through a good hook to keep you reading to find out the detail of how/what happens. Well before all the debates in Parliament in 2003…
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2D Morale Chart
Further to the previous post Faith in Morale I've tried to synthesize the varioius readings on military psychology into a set of morale rules that might give a realistic ebb and flow to an engagement. I've not had a chance to test these yet, but here's what the chart looks like. v01 of the 2D Morale Chart, (c) 2014 James Kemp Reading through the various OR type publications it seems to me that morale is affected by proximity to both friends and the enemy. The closer solders get to the enemy the more they seem to do things other than follow orders. This is not really a surprise, but it's nice to see the research back up the gut feel. Where I can find hard numbers for things I have used them to construct the 2D morale chart. In some…
Book Review – Bullets and Brains by Leo Murray
Brains and Bullets: How Psychology Wins Wars by Leo Murray My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an excellent and very readable book which tries to put some hard numbers on a variety of psychological tactics that can be used to persuade your own troops to fight and the enemy to give up. This is an excellent work on what happens in combat and why. It is very readable, structured into bite sized chunks on the key phenomena and then some joining up when it has all been explained. Each chapter opens with an account from a real soldier who experienced that psychological effect in combat. This is then analysed and explained, pulling in other examples as required to show that it isn't an isolated incident but a general effect. Those examples range from the Napoleonic Wars right up…
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Games on COIN
This post is prompted by an excellent post by the guys at On Violence. You should read Capturing Australia! COIN is Boring to which this was my belated comment. McCormick model of insurgency (Photo credit: Wikipedia) My apologies for coming late to this one, I’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks now and being spending time with the family. I’ve been interested in designing a counter insurgency game since the mid 1990s. The original trigger for my interest were the decolonisation conflicts of the British Empire. This wasn’t a board game, nor a computer game. The group I belong to designs face to face games for multiple participants, a bit like the sort of command post exercises those of us who’ve done some military or civil contingencies time would recognise. I never ran the decolonisation game that prompted…