They may reflect a battle - but it's more likely the game will reflect the relative lobbying skills of the various groups who set the parameters. This doesn't always take into account little things like grains of sand that may skew a value. No doubt this article is going to generate a lot of responses. Peter da Silva finds this reminiscent of the infamous Club Of Rome models that assigned pollution to a single numerical value and predicted that we'd all be dead by now. For a more recent example, consider that the ADE of the USSR forces in Afghanistan surely exceeded that of the Afghan rebels, yet they lost.
Computer models are usually naive, or even stupid.
First, I have read much available literature, from the RAND Corp., the GAO, etc. Once you get into these, follow the trail that the bibliographies give. It is robust and elegant, but no genius. In grad school, one my my profs had worked for Getty Oil, as an Ops Researcher. He told of the rivalry between the Getty half brothers.