Changing knives into spoons

Politicians and the media paint contrasting pictures of the situation in Iraq from a growing insurgency and pending civil war to a blooming democracy in the Middle East. However, in all of the discussions, the question of how to employ forces to fight the insurgency is often avoided and rarely answered. This project will attempt to develop a hybrid agent-based simulation to examine resource allocation strategies. The study will examine insurgent behavior and responses to distance based outpost manning and a more incident driven strategy. Initial results show that a tradeoff between the strategies offers the best benefits in both the short and long term for a collection of counter-insurgency metrics.