World War II Battles Reconsidered: Game Theory and Decision Science Perspectives on Gazala, El Alamein, Falaise and Arnhem
This book returns to four turning points of the Second World War and reads them through the logic of game theory and modern decision science, showing that victory and defeat often followed rules that can be named and tested.
Consider Gazala, in the Libyan desert in the late spring of 1942: a defeat so total it has been called perhaps the most spectacular run of victories ever won against a British army. Its cause, in part, was a broken rule: Napoleon's Maxim, do not do what your enemy wishes you to. Months later and a country away, the British reversed their fortunes at El Alamein, and that comeback traces to a principle armies have honored for millennia and decision scientists still endorse today: unity of command. The pattern holds at Falaise in France in August 1944, where an Allied win fell short of what it might have been, undone by an overcautious instinct that three distinct kinds of fatigue may have bred. And at Arnhem in the Netherlands, just a month after, a costly Allied failure raises a pointed question game theory is well equipped to ask: is surprise on the battlefield worth as much as soldiers have always believed?
Drawing on deep expertise in game theory and illustrated throughout with detailed maps, this book is a pioneering effort to bring the tools of decision science to bear on the pivotal battles of the Second World War.