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.
It’s also interesting that the city was named Cherynobyl. I wonder what the city’s namers were thinking when they named the city after a bitter tasting plant.
In the town center of Chornobyl, there is now the Wormwood Star Memorial, which depicts an angel blowing a trumpet in reference to the following:
“The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” [Book of Revelation, Chapter 8, Verses 10-11]
English-language Bibles have the name of that star (often used as a symbolic reference to an angel) translated as “wormwood” (Artemisia absinthium). In Ukrainian and Russian Bibles the name of the star is polyn, a word which is used interchangeably for numerous plants within the larger mugwort or Artemisia family. Chornobyl (the plant from which the town takes its name) is one such polyn.
The Monument of the Third Angel was installed as part of a memorial park in Chornobyl on April 26, 2011 (the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster). The grand opening ceremony was attended by the presidents of both Ukraine and Russia. Just beyond the angel begins a memorial path, decorated with the names of the region’s evacuated villages, and honoring all those people who lost their lives, homes, and communities in the aftermath of the catastrophe. How quickly that shared experience got overshadowed by war between the two peoples or their leaders (well, one leader more than the other).