Game-Theoretic Modeling and Control of Military Air Operations with Retaliatory Civilians

Non-neutral civilians often play an active role in wars. That is, they are not just passively static but might dynamically take non-neutral actions to retaliate against the Forces who create collateral damage for them. Unfortunately, existing game theoretic models usually do not consider this situation. In this paper, an attrition-type discrete time dynamic game model is formulated, in which two opposing forces fight under reactive civilian environments that might be either neutral or slightly biased. We model the objective functions, control strategies of different players, and identify the associated constraints on the control and state variables. Existing attrition-like state space models can be regarded as a special case of the model proposed in this paper. An example scenario and extensive simulations illustrate possible applications of this model and comparative discussions further clarify the benefits.