COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 31

BATTLE SIMULATION FOR THE US SIGNAL CORP.
The US Army Signal Corp. needed to test new and different kinds of communication equipment under wartime conditions, but did not want to start a war just to find a place to test! It would take a long time to try and explain how we could do that in a computer, but I’ll try, a little. Very little.

By the time I got there, the project had been underway for a year or two already, and had a year or two to go. A dozen people, including several Ph.D.s in math, retired Army officers, and others who thought they knew how to make this work, made up the staff. Here again, I was the only civilian without two or three college degrees, but since I understood computers and how they worked and what they did, and had worked with computer simulation at RAND, I was useful!

We “mathematically” described a friendly “Blue” army, and an enemy “Red” army. We “described” the headquarters, the artillery, the infantry, and how they worked with each other. Then we described the terrain where the war was to be fought — that is the hills, rivers, roads, trees, fields, and most anything you can describe about a land area.

Then we “described” the Army’s communication equipment. How far could it broadcast, the antennae involved, how much wire was needed, how long it took to set up, could it be “jammed” by the enemy, etc. In addition, equipment of any kind fails to work now and then, and that had to be included in the calculations.

Each of the two armies needed to communicate with their different units of soldiers, and we needed to describe what would happen if a message was received, and what wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t. If the artillery didn’t get the message to fire the guns, and if they were not told where to point them, the war would not be won.

If the message got to the artillery and the guns were fired, we then computed what damage had been done, and how many people had been killed or wounded, how much equipment had been damaged or destroyed.

If enough of the “Red” soldiers were casualties, then the “Blue” Army could advance, and that meant the communication equipment must have worked OK. Of course, during the battle, some communication equipment was destroyed, some was damaged, and some just didn’t work.