Abstract: The increasing presence of electronic warfare devices on the battlefield, combined with doctrine that emphasises the value of manoeuvre, precision strike, and high operational tempo, present the military operations researcher with increasingly difficult problems. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly obvious that traditional OR techniques have serious limitations for describing complex systems with non-linear dependencies, which are common on the battlefield. This paper describes how a cellular automata model can make some headway on the problem of describing the modern reconnaissance environment. The model emphasises the behaviour of the participants rather than the physics of the equipment. This leads to complex interactions between the entities, which go some way towards representing the non- linearities inherent in real-life operations. The value of detection-range advantage and aerial reconnaissance falls out of the model remarkably naturally when one considers the arbitrary way these are represented in conventional models. Moreover, it is seen that for certain ranges of parameters, the survivability of the Recce force is nearly independent of the kill probability of the weapons of its opponents, a result that contrasts with the Lanchester-like nature of conventional models. For these reasons, the results presented should be of great significance to the military OR community.