A2/D2 Study

A2/D2 Study = Anti-armor defense data study.

In the last days of the Soviet Union—before anyone realized they *were* the last days—the NATO nations were still doing all they could to prepare for a possible Soviet onslaught into Western Europe. They had spent decades developing combat models to help them predict where the blow would fall, where defense would be critical, where logistics would make the difference, what mix of forces could survive. Their main problem was that they didn’t know how far they could trust those models. How could they validate them? Maybe if they could reverse-engineer the past, they could be relied upon to predict the future.

To that end, the American Department of Defense (DoD) and (particularly) the British Defence Operational Analysis Establishment (DOAE) undertook to collect data about historical battles that resembled the battles they expected to be fighting, with the aim of feeding that data into their models and seeing how much the models’ results resembled the historical outcomes of those battles. The thinking went that if the models could produce a result similar to history, they could be confident that feeding in modern data would produce a realistic result and teach them how to adjust their dispositions for optimal results.

One of the battles that NATO expected to fight was a Soviet armored drive through the Fulda Gap, a relatively flat corridor through otherwise rough terrain in south-central West Germany. The battle that most resembled such an operation, in the minds of the planners, was the December 1944 surprise attack by the German Army into the Ardennes Forest region along the German/Luxembourg/Belgian border, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge for the wedge-shaped salient it drove into American lines. As the British involvement in this epic battle—what Churchill called the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Army—was minor, consisting of a minor holding action by XXX Corps, the DOAE delegated collecting the relevant data for this battle to the DoD. The responsible element of the DoD was the Army’s Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA), which in turn hired defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform the data collection and study. In late 1990 SAIC began in-depth research, consisting of archival reviews and interviews of surviving veterans, for the project which hoped to identify engagements down to vehicle-on-vehicle action, with rounds expended, ammunition types, ranges, and other quantitative data which could be fed into models. Ultimately the study team, led by former HERO researcher and Trevor Dupuy protégé Jay Karamales, identified and recorded details for 56 combat actions from the ETO in 1944-1945, most from the Battle of the Bulge; and the detailed data from these engagements was used in the validation efforts for various combat models. This quantitative data, along with a copious amount of anecdotal information, was used as the basis for Karamales’ 1996 book with his co-author Allyn Vannoy titled Against the Panzers: United States Infantry versus German Tanks, 1944-1945: A History of Eight Battles Told through Diaries, Unit Histories and Interviews.

Copies of this study are available at DTIC. If you put “saic a2d2” into a search engine you should find all the volumes in PDF format on the DTIC website. As an example, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a232910.pdf or http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA284378

 

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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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2 Comments

  1. The Defense Technical Information center site is blocked in Germany now. I could still navigate and open it a few months ago, now it is stating a “Server not found error”. I am relying on a Proxy now. I doubt that any individual configuration is responsible for this, as I have not made any serious changes over that time period.

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