Customer Reviews

Military Operations Research: Quantitative Decision Making (International Series in Operations Research & Management Science)

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Jaiswal provides the most recent land power-focused military operations research volume. He provides a basic survey of the field, beginning with a very brief discussion of the origins of OR in the military. His topics include search and detection, military simulation, cost effectiveness analysis, optimization, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Lanchester equations, and a quantified approach to intelligence analysis. The reader should be aware that his coverage of various specific military simulation models is a bit dated, as one should expect in a book, and limited in scope. Beyond that topic, his treatment is broad and therefore less sensitive to the passage of time. The book is a survey, so depth of treatment is not present. But it fills the intended role of pulling together disparate topics of land-based military OR. It also provides some perspective on non NATO defense issues. It must be challenging to decide what to exclude, but surprisingly there is no coverage of network flows, queuing theory, decision analysis, or game theory which have clear military applications. The focus is also on operations rather than the logistics of military analysis.

This book is by far the only book that comprehensively deals with Military Operations Research (MOR). The OR/SA field despite its origins in Military Operations has not seen as many books and texts as the business OR or Theory of OR. This can be attributed to the confidential nature of work the practitioners of MOR carry out.

The book by Dr Jaiswal fills a huge gap by covering major areas of MOR field. What is really appreciable about this book is that the author covers areas such as analytical modeling, simulation, wargames to complex theories of Combat Modeling as reflected in two chapters on Lanchester Theory. However the icing on the cake are the chapters on Strategic Decision Making and Threat analysis. The coverage is comprehensive and remarkably lucid. To include so much variation and to control the overflow that normally happens to knowledgable authors, Dr Jaiswal is able to give us a book that will serve the cause of MOR field for years to come. The book has already shown its importance and is already on its way to becoming a classic, as exemplified by adoption of the book in various universities teaching MOR around the world.

This reviewer salutes the author for coming out with an excellent text which fills up a yawning gap in the field.