Strategize

Strategize

The room was abuzz with activity, everyone focussed deeply on their job. John had gone unnoticed for the last hour as he watched movements from the raised observation area in the room. The room itself was dark, noisy, and smelled faintly of cigars. Bright lights lit up the giant map that dominated the centre of the room. Just beyond the wall of light stood trained men and women, wearing two way communication headsets. A soft buzz of broken conversations floated up from the map. The mathematician watched as the handlers occasionally bend over into the light to use their long wooden poles to move small bits of bright plastics around.

Enemy and friendly troop movements, refugees, support teams and international oversight. They all had their own colouration scheme and a trained eye could immediately visualise the developing situation as though they were God, watching from the clouds of heaven. Behind him, field marshals and generals were in deep discussion about the available troops and strategies. John wasn’t quite sure why he had been summoned here, if there even was a reason. He kept his eyes on the plastic markers, trying to see if their movements could reveal hidden equations.

Identifying the two opposing armies and the non-combatants had been easy enough. Slightly more difficult was identifying what kind of unit the patterns on the plastic chips indicated. Circles appeared to be planes, either moving quickly and in straight lines or not moving at all. The triangles however, travelled almost as quick as the circles, but in more erratic lines and apparently following the terrain in some way. He recognised one of the triangle movements but couldn’t place it for a while.

Shifting his attention to the single and double striped plastics, he tried to determine whether they indicated size, battle-strength, experience or unit-type. He found a grouping of the two, apparently a single striped unit had met up with a double striped unit and were now retreating together. He noticed a cube had moved a bit towards their flank, but keeping it’s distance. An arrow next to the cube pointed towards the area the striped had just backed away from. Artillery seemed most likely.

Trains! The realisation hit him somewhat unexpectedly. The triangles kept following train tracks, most likely fast troop and resource transport trains. His insight in the ongoing theatre of war increased every minute he watched the movements. Enemy armour was trying to outflank friendly artillery. Allied infantry swept in from the south to intercept and prevent a quick advance while the artillery moved to support the advance of a large group of armour and infantry trying to advance towards a weak spot in the enemy lines. A squadron of bombers was under way to soften up those same lines but had to hurry to avoid the enemy fighters heading on an intercept course.

War was chaos, John realised. It had taken him at least an hour to be able to read the events of a single encounter. Similar events were taking place across the board, some seemed in favour of the enemy, some in his own side. He turned and saw the army officers staring at him, waiting. Chaos theory and probabilities. They had seemed such an innocuous and interesting subjects only a few years ago.