The Bridge

Mark Jones, Jr.

Communicating Uncertainty in #Wargaming Outcomes

Communicating Uncertainty in #Wargaming Outcomes

With these games will come a far greater deluge of information, requiring of leaders a greater skill, a more urgent need to make sense of it all and inform decisions. Since the dawn of man and war, we have seen technology improve our ability to strike targets and wage war, and we should expect the same learning curve in our application of these three principles for communicating uncertainty together with advances in simulation and computation. At the dawn of airpower in World War I, hundreds of bombs fell before single targets were destroyed. Today we hit single targets within hundreds of centimeters. In the next war, we will be required to use information, like the uncertainty implicit in the outcomes of a hundred wargames, to create strategic effects with the same precision. This simple introduction to communicating uncertainty may be analogous to those early days, to a single bomb dropped in the first World War. Hopefully, though, the utility of these ideas is more readily apparent and their potential will be realized more quickly.

#Reviewing Tribe

#Reviewing Tribe

Though [Tribe] is brief, in this enjoyable book readers—whether veteran or not—will walk away with a greater appreciation for the challenges facing those weary from war at their homecoming. Those who study war will also uncover profound wisdom, both in the conduct of war and the care of its combatants. If it is incomplete in the defense of its underlying ideology, it does, however, succeed as a warning, a reminder of the cost of war and a challenge to society cultivate the solidarity that brought us “to this extraordinary moment in our history.” If, as Junger implies, solidarity brought us this crossroads in our history, “it may also be the only thing that allows us to survive it.”

#Reviewing No Place to Hide

#Reviewing No Place to Hide

From the first pages of No Place to Hide, I found myself transported back to Iraq. I walked between the rows of sandbags and around the puddles of filth as I made my way through long rows of modular housing units. Eventually I popped out near the courtyard fence, the one that separated the pool area from the palace itself. I shuffled my feet across the wet patio and made my way to the fifty-five gallon drum filled with concrete, mounted at an angle, and pointed the barrel of my empty nine millimeter Beretta pistol into the three inch opening. I pulled back the slide, checked the empty chamber for the one hundredth time, and let it spring back into position. As I made my way into the chow hall to wash my hands again and dry them with something that felt like wet toilet paper, I tried to ignore the dull feeling deep inside.