Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat (ISAAC): An Arti ̄cial-Life Approach to Land Combat

This paper introduces a simple multiagent-based \toy model" of land combat called ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat) to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional topdown, or reductionist approach, and represents a ̄rst step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battle ̄eld. This model was developed as part of a recently completed project, sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC), that assessed the general applicability of \complex systems theory" to land warfare.