TMCI is officially closing this year

The Military Conflict Institute (TMCI) is officially closing this year. The TMCI webpage is here: http://militaryconflict.org/. The website had not been updated since 2014.

TMCI was founded in 1979 by Dr. Donald S. Marshall and Trevor Dupuy. They were concerned by the inability of existing Defense Department combat models to produce results that were consistent or rooted in historical experience. The organization was a non-profit, interdisciplinary, informal group that avoided government affiliation in order to maintain an independent perspective and voice. It’s object was to advance public understanding or organized warfare in all its aspects. Most of the initial members were drawn from the ranks of operations analyst experienced in quantitative historical study and military operations research.

The organization conducted over 60 general meetings over its 41 years of existence, usually hosting two meetings a year. I gather in the early years, some of its meetings had over a hundred attendees, but in recent times it was a core group of around 20. There were also attempts to get funding from DOD to support it, which never occurred.

The TMCI eventually ended up being run by Roger Mickelson. During this stage, it actually wrote and published three books: 1) Anatomy of a Combat Model published in 1995, 2) A Concise Theory of Combat published in 1997, and 3) A Philosophy of War published in 2013.

The Anatomy of a Combat Model was written by Lawrence J. Low and is available from the TMCI site at http://militaryconflict.org/Anatomy%20of%20a%20Combat%20Model_1.pdf  I am not sure it will continue to be available through this website. It does not appear to be posted elsewhere.

A Concise Theory of Combat was written by Edmund L. Dubois, Wayne P. Hughes Jr., and Lawrence J. Low. Link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40235431-a-concise-theory-of-combat and I gather can be downloaded from here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/47751814/A-Concise-Theory-of-Combat and here: https://core.ac.uk/display/36731683 . I cannot vouch for the validity of either of these sites.

I cannot find a link to A Philosophy of War. I have my hard copy but cannot find where it can be obtained on line. It is not on Amazon.

Roger Mickelson was killed in 2016 in a car accident and while TMCI continued, it seemed to have lost focus. Some of the people involved in it, Wayne Hughes and Chuck Hawkins, also recently passed away.

TMCI never really accomplished what it hoped to do. Partly because it never got funding and nor had a staff. As such, there was little work done between meetings and everything was volunteer only. You get what you pay for with volunteer work. If the DOD feels that there is a need for independent analysis of combat and the development of a theory of combat, then they probably need to fund such an effort. So far, they have not.

A few related posts:

The Military Conflict Institute (TMCI) Will Meet in October

Three Presentations

The Elements of Trevor Dupuy’s Theory of Combat

World War IV

Roger Mickelson (Col, USA): “Final Change of Command”

So, Who’s Your Favorite Admiral?

Charles Hawkins passed away

Published Obituary for Charles Hawkins

John Honig passed away

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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5 Comments

  1. Would you please make a photo of the “Philosophy of War” book’s cover and contents? It is really vital for me. I can not find it as well

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