Maneuver warfare distillations: essence not verisimilitude

When should one engage the enemy directly and when should one maneuver? Of course, the answer depends on the circumstances, and the simulations presented in this paper are simply illustrative. The purpose is to describe one aspect of an on-going Marine Corps research program called Project Albert. This aspect is our attempt to capture, i.e. distill, the essence of a subject in as simple a simulation as possible. We don't even call our models "simulations", preferring the word "distillations". Because they are by nature simple, we can run them many times to try to gain insight into our questions, and we have the ability to grow even more data to explore interesting regions of output, a process we call "data farming". The process of looking at many manifestations of an operation and then trying to build a deeper understanding of the whole structure is a sample of what we call "operational synthesis". A contrasting approach would be to increase the verisimilitude up to the limits of computing power and run a small number of iterations. Many current military application efforts are in line with this contrasting approach and yet don't seem to meet the challenges required to answer our questions.