![]() They can also allow users to transcend their current realities, ideally by helping them to question and assess those “ known unknowns” (and potentially those wicked “ unknown unknowns”) that may radically alter the future battlespace. In the absence of combat, simulations like the Louisiana Maneuvers can root out weaknesses, refine concepts and technologies, and acclimatize troops to the complex and varied physical realities of the battlefield. Army’s pre-war mobilization.įrom the meticulous drills or “ bloodless battles” of ancient Roman legionaries to the tabletop Kriegsspiel of Georg von Reisswitz and the more recent use of distributed, virtual, and constructive training architectures, the act of simulating war - whether through maneuvers, exercises, or wargames - has long constituted an invaluable means of training, experimentation, and signaling. While not a panacea, the maneuvers, in short, were the denouement of the U.S. Perhaps most importantly, the Louisiana Maneuvers confirmed - to Americans, allies, and adversaries alike - that a ragtag group of “ civilians in khaki pants” had been molded over the previous two years into a fighting army. Air-ground integration, despite an initial Army Air Corps bias towards high-altitude precision daylight bombardment, was shown to have value. Anti-tank guns were verified as an effective countermeasure to armored vehicles. Indeed, notwithstanding some adjudicatory, training, and bureaucratic limitations, the mass exercises played a pivotal role in confirming the necessity of deploying tanks alongside infantry as a combined arms force. However, their true worth was as a “ combat college for troop leading” and as a field laboratory to test and train for emerging operational concepts. The maneuvers can be heralded as a logistical achievement: At no other time has there been such a concentration of man and materiel on U.S. 15 was the start of the Louisiana Maneuvers, a series of four exercises that took place over two separate venues - the Louisiana-Texas border and the Carolinas - with each spanning vast, scarcely populated areas of dense forests, uncharted swamps, and river crossings. ![]() At 15:30 on Friday, just as the red force’s eastern flank at Natchitoches started to crumble, the exercise was halted. Over the course of five days, a small, mobile red force and a numerically superior blue force maneuvered over 3,400 square miles, engaging in a series of tank and antitank skirmishes from the Red River to the Leesville-Many highway. ![]() The opposing “red” force’s mission: invade “blue” territory and destroy the enemy concentrated near Lake Charles. As a tropical storm sent torrential rains throughout the Gulf of Mexico, swelling rivers and caking the ground in mud, 472,000 troops bivouacked between Shreveport and Lake Charles, Louisiana, for the largest (simulated) force-on-force battle in U.S. 15, 1941, a special kind of war was declared. I want the mistakes down in Louisiana, not over in Europe, and the only way to do this thing is to try it out, and if it doesn’t work, find out what we need to make it work. My God, Senator, that’s the reason I do it. ![]() The second essay explored how safety science and civilian AI can inform the use of AI in the military. The first article looked at how the United States should bring tech experts and the innovative ideas they develop into the Department of Defense at an accelerated rate, and why those innovations should be shared with allies. ![]() This article is the third and final in a series on digital defense. ![]()
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