Mystics & Statistics

McMaster vs Spector on Vietnam

Lt. General H. R. McMaster, the U.S. National Security Advisor, wrote a doctoral dissertation on Vietnam that was published in 1997 as Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Ronald Spector, former Marine, Vietnam vet, and historian just published this interesting article:  What McMaster Gets Wrong About Vietnam

What caught my interest was the discussion by Spector, very brief, that the Vietnamese had something to do with the Vietnam war. Not an earthshaking statement, but certainly a deserved poke at the more American-centric view of the war.

In my book, America’s Modern Wars, I do have a chapter called “The Other Side” (Chapter 18). As I note in the intro to that chapter (page 224):

Warfare is always a struggle between at least two sides. Yet, the theoretical study of insurgencies always seems to be written primarily from the standpoint of one side, the counterinsurgents. We therefore briefly looked at what the other side was saying to see if there were any theoretical constructs that were proposed or supported by them. They obviously knew as much about insurgencies as the counterinsurgents.

We then examined the writings and interview transcripts of eight practitioners of insurgency and ended up trying to summarize their thoughts in one barely “easy-to-read” table (pages 228-229), the same as we did for ten counterinsurgent theorists (pages 187-201). The conclusion to this discussion was (pages 235-236):

The review of the insurgents shows an entirely different focus as to what is important in an insurgency than one gets from reading the “classical” counterinsurgent theorists. In the end, the insurgent is primarily focused on the cause. The military aspects of the insurgency seem to be secondary concerns…..On the other hand, the majority of the insurgents we reviewed actually won or managed a favorable results from their war in the long run (this certainly applies to Grivas and Itote). Perhaps their focus on the political cause, with the military aspects secondary, is an indication of the correct priorities. 

I do have a chapter on Vietnam in the book also (Chapter 22).

NATO’S Black Sea Force

This article caught my attention: NATO launches Black Sea force as latest counter to Russia

It consists of a Romanian brigade of up to 4,000 soldiers, troops from nine other NATO countries (including Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Britain, Canada). In addition, there is a separate deployment of 900 U.S. troops in the area.

During the cold war, there was only one NATO member on the Black Sea, Turkey, but there were three Warsaw Pact members (Soviet Union, Romania and Bulgaria). Now there are three NATO members (Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria), several countries who have a Russian-supported separatist enclave or two in them  (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova) and, of course, Russia. It has become an interesting area.

 

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

The fundamental building blocks of history are primary sources, i.e artifacts, documents, diaries and memoirs, manuscripts, or other contemporaneous sources of information. It has been the availability and accessibility of primary source documentation that allowed Trevor Dupuy and The Dupuy Institute to build the large historical combat databases that much of their analyses have drawn upon. It took uncounted man-hours of time-consuming, pain-staking research to collect and assemble two-sided data sufficiently detailed to analyze the complex phenomena of combat.

Going back to the Civil War, the United States has done a commendable job collecting and organizing captured military documentation and making that material available for historians, scholars, and professional military educators. TDI has made extensive use of captured German documentation from World War I and World War II held by the U.S. National Archives in its research, for example.

Unfortunately, that dedication faltered when it came to preserving documentation recovered from the battlefield during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. As related by Douglas Cox, an attorney and Law Library Professor at the City University of New York School of Law, millions of pages of Iraqi military paper documents collected during Operation DESERT STORM were destroyed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2002 after they were contaminated by mold.

As described by the National Archives,

The documents date from 1978 up until Operation Desert Storm (1991). The collection includes Iraq operations plans and orders; maps and overlays; unit rosters (including photographs); manuals covering tactics, camouflage, equipment, and doctrine; equipment maintenance logs; ammunition inventories; unit punishment records; unit pay and leave records; handling of prisoners of war; detainee lists; lists of captured vehicles; and other military records. The collection also includes some manuals of foreign, non-Iraqi weapons systems. Some of Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Command Council records are in the captured material.

According to Cox, DIA began making digital copies of the documents shortly after the Gulf War ended. After the State Department requested copies, DIA subsequently determined that only 60% of the digital tapes the original scans had been stored on could be read. It was during an effort to rescan the lost 40% of the documents that it was discovered that the entire paper collection had been contaminated by mold.

DIA created a library of the scanned documents stored on 43 compact discs, which remain classified. It is not clear if DIA still has all of the CDs; none had been transferred to the National Archives as of 2012. A set of 725,000 declassifed pages was made available for a research effort at Harvard in 2000. That effort ended, however, and the declassified collection was sent to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The collection is closed to researchers, although Hoover has indicated it hopes to make it publicly available sometime in the future.

While the failure to preserve the original paper documents is bad enough, the possibility that any or all of the DIA’s digital collection might be permanently lost would constitute a grievous and baffling blunder. It also makes little sense for this collection to remain classified a quarter of a century after end of the Gulf War. Yet, it appears that failures to adequately collect and preserve U.S. military documents and records is becoming more common in the Information Age.

TDI Friday Read: Tank Warfare In World War II

American troops advance under the cover of M4 Sherman tank ‘Lucky Legs II’ during mop up operations on Bougainville, Solomon Islands, March 1944. [National Archives/ww2dbase]

In honor of Tony Buzbee, who has parked a fully-functional vintage World War II era M-4 Sherman tank in front of his house in Houston, Texas (much to the annoyance of his home owner’s association), here is a selection of posts addressing various aspects of tank warfare in World War II for you weekend leisure reading.

https://dupuyinstitute.org/2016/08/23/counting-holes-in-tanks-in-tunisia/

U.S. Tank Losses and Crew Casualties in World War II

Tank Loss Rates in Combat: Then and Now

https://dupuyinstitute.org/2017/04/03/was-kursk-the-largest-tank-battle-in-history/

A2/D2 Study

Against the Panzers

And, of course, Chris Lawrence has written the largest existing book on the largest tank battle in history, Kursk.

Size of U.S. Defense Budget

If you have kids, the conversations sometime wander into strange areas. I was told yesterday that the U.S. Defense budget was 54% of the U.S. budget. I said that not right, even though Siri was telling him otherwise.

It turns out that in 2015 that the U.S. Defense budget was 54% of U.S. discretionary spending, according to Wikipedia. This is a significant distinction. In 2015 the U.S. defense budget was $598 billion. In 2015 the U.S. Federal budget was $3.688 trillion actual (compared to 3.9 Trillion requested). This is 16% of the U.S. budget. As always, have to read carefully.

Just to complete the math, the U.S. GDP in 2015 was 18.037 Trillion (United Nations figures). So, federal budget is  20% of GDP (or 22% is the requested budget figure is used) and defense budget is 3.3% of GDP.

Latest figures are 583 billion for U.S. Defense budget (requested for 2017), 3.854 estimated expenditures for the U.S. Federal Budget for 2016 and 4.2 trillion requested for 2017, and 18.56 trillion for U.S. GDP (2016) and 19.3 trillion (preliminary for 2017).

 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#21st_century

And other wikipedia links.

 

 

Human Factors In Warfare: Combat Effectiveness

An Israeli tank unit crosses the Sinai, heading for the Suez Canal, during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War [Israeli Government Press Office/HistoryNet]

It has been noted throughout the history of human conflict that some armies have consistently fought more effectively on the battlefield than others. The armies of Sparta in ancient Greece, for example, have come to epitomize the warrior ideal in Western societies. Rome’s legions have acquired a similar legendary reputation. Within armies too, some units are known to be superior combatants than others. The U.S. 1st Infantry Division, the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, Japan’s Special Naval Landing Forces, the U.S. Marine Corps, the German 7th Panzer Division, and the Soviet Guards divisions are among the many superior fighting forces from history.

Trevor Dupuy found empirical substantiation of this in his analysis of historical combat data. He discovered that in 1943-1944 during World War II, after accounting for environmental and operational factors, the German Army consistently performed more effectively in ground combat than the U.S. and British armies. This advantage—measured in terms of casualty exchanges, terrain held or lost, and mission accomplishment—manifested whether the Germans were attacking or defending, or winning or losing. Dupuy observed that the Germans demonstrated an even more marked effectiveness in battle against the Soviet Army throughout the war.

He found the same disparity in battlefield effectiveness in combat data on the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. The Israeli Army performed uniformly better in ground combat over all of the Arab armies it faced in both conflicts, regardless of posture or outcome.

The clear and consistent patterns in the historical data led Dupuy to conclude that superior combat effectiveness on the battlefield was attributable to moral and behavioral (i.e. human) factors. Those factors he believed were the most important contributors to combat effectiveness were:

  • Leadership
  • Training or Experience
  • Morale, which may or may not include
  • Cohesion

Although the influence of human factors on combat effectiveness was identifiable and measurable in the aggregate, Dupuy was skeptical whether all of the individual moral and behavioral intangibles could be discreetly quantified. He thought this particularly true for a set of factors that also contributed to combat effectiveness, but were a blend of human and operational factors. These include:

  • Logistical effectiveness
  • Time and Space
  • Momentum
  • Technical Command, Control, Communications
  • Intelligence
  • Initiative
  • Chance

Dupuy grouped all of these intangibles together into a composite factor he designated as relative combat effectiveness value, or CEV. The CEV, along with environmental and operational factors (Vf), comprise the Circumstantial Variables of Combat, which when multiplied by force strength (S), determines the combat power (P) of a military force in Dupuy’s formulation.

P = S x Vf x CEV

Dupuy did not believe that CEVs were static values. As with human behavior, they vary somewhat from engagement to engagement. He did think that human factors were the most substantial of the combat variables. Therefore any model or theory of combat that failed to account for them would invariably be inaccurate.

NOTES

This post is drawn from Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Indianapolis; New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1979), Chapters 5, 7 and 9; Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987), Chapters 8 and 10; and Trevor N. Dupuy, “The Fundamental Information Base for Modeling Human Behavior in Combat, ” presented at the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Mini-Symposium, “Human Behavior and Performance as Essential Ingredients in Realistic Modeling of Combat – MORIMOC II,” 22-24 February 1989, Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia.

TDI Friday Read: Mike Spagat’s Economics of Warfare Lectures & Commentaries

Below is an aggregated list of links to Dr. Michael Spagat‘s E3320: Economics of Warfare lecture series at the Royal Holloway University of London, and Chris Lawrence’s commentary on each. Spagat is a professor of economics and the course addresses quantitative research on war.

The aim of the course is to:

Introduce students to the main facts about conflict. Apply theoretical and empirical economic tools to the study of conflict. Give students an appreciation of the main questions at the research frontier in the economic analysis of conflict. Draw some policy conclusions on how the international community should deal with conflict. Study data issues that arise when analysing conflict.
Mike’s Lecture Chris’s Commentary
Economics of Warfare 1 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 2 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 3 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 4 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 5 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 6 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 7 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 8 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 9 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 10 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 11 Commentary 1

Commentary 2
Economics of Warfare 12 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 13 Commentary 1

Commentary 2

Commentary 3
Economics of Warfare 14 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 15 Commentary 1

Commentary 2
Economics of Warfare 16 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 17 Commentary 1

Commentary 2

Commentary 3
Economics of Warfare 18 Commentary
Economics of Warfare 19 Commentary 1

Commentary 2

Commentary 3

Commentary 4
Economics of Warfare 20 Commentary

A Return To Big Guns In Future Naval Warfare?

The first shot of the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) electromagnetic railgun, conducted at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division in Virginia on 17 November 2016. [ONR’s Official YouTube Page]

Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported last month that the U.S Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) had achieved a breakthrough in capacitor design which is an important step forward in facilitating the use of electromagnetic railguns in future warships. The new capacitors are compact yet capable of delivering 20 megajoule bursts of electricity. ONR plans to increase this to 32 megajoules by next year.

Railguns use such bursts of energy to power powerful electromagnets capable of accelerating projectiles to hypersonic speeds. ONR’s goal is to produce railguns capable of firing 10 rounds per minute to a range of 100 miles.

The Navy initiated railgun development in 2005, intending to mount them on the new Zumwalt class destroyers. Since then, the production run of Zumwalts was cut from 32 to three. With the railguns still under development, the Navy has mounted 155mm cannons on them in the meantime.

Development of the railgun and a suitable naval powerplant continues. While the Zumwalts can generate 78 megajoules of energy and the Navy’s current railgun design only needs 25 to fire, the Navy still wants advanced capacitors capable of powering 150-killowatt lasers for drone defense, and new generations of radars and electronic warfare systems as well.

While railguns are huge improvement over chemical powered naval guns, there are still doubts about their effectiveness in combat compared to guided anti-ship missiles. Railgun projectiles are currently unguided and the Navy’s existing design is less powerful than the 1,000 pound warhead on the new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).

The U.S. Navy remains committed to railgun development nevertheless. For one idea of the role railguns and the U.S.S. Zumwalt might play in a future war, take a look at P. W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, which came out in 2015.

Human Factors In Warfare: Interaction Of Variable Factors

The Second Battle of Ypres, 22 April to 25 May 1915 by Richard Jack [Canadian War Museum]

Trevor Dupuy thought that it was possible to identify and quantify the effects of some individual moral and behavioral (i.e. human) factors on combat. He also believed that many of these factors interacted with each other and with environmental and operational (i.e. physical) variables in combat as well, although parsing and quantifying these effects was a good deal more difficult. Among the combat phenomena he considered to be the result of interaction with human factors were:

Dupuy was critical of combat models and simulations that failed to address these relationships. The prevailing approach to the design of combat modeling used by the U.S. Department of Defense is known as the aggregated, hierarchical, or “bottom-up” construct. Bottom-up models generally use the Lanchester equations, or some variation on them, to calculate combat outcomes between individual soldiers, tanks, airplanes, and ships. These results are then used as inputs for models representing warfare at the brigade/division level, the outputs of which are then fed into theater-level simulations. Many in the American military operations research community believe bottom-up models to be the most realistic method of modeling combat.

Dupuy criticized this approach for many reasons (including the inability of the Lanchester equations to accurately replicate real-world combat outcomes), but mainly because it failed to represent human factors and their interactions with other combat variables.

It is almost undeniable that there must be some interaction among and within the effects of physical as well as behavioral variable factors. I know of no way of measuring this. One thing that is reasonably certain is that the use of the bottom-up approach to model design and development cannot capture such interactions. (Most models in use today are bottom-up models, built up from one-on-one weapons interactions to many-on-many.) Presumably these interactions are captured in a top-down model derived from historical experience, of which there is at least one in existence [by which, Dupuy meant his own].

Dupuy was convinced that any model of combat that failed to incorporate human factors would invariably be inaccurate, which put him at odds with much of the American operations research community.

War does not consist merely of a number of duels. Duels, in fact, are only a very small—though integral—part of combat. Combat is a complex process involving interaction over time of many men and numerous weapons combined in a great number of different, and differently organized, units. This process cannot be understood completely by considering the theoretical interactions of individual men and weapons. Complete understanding requires knowing how to structure such interactions and fit them together. Learning how to structure these interactions must be based on scientific analysis of real combat data.[1]

While this unresolved debate went dormant some time ago, bottom-up models became the simulations of choice in Defense Department campaign planning and analysis. It should be noted, however, that the Defense Department disbanded its campaign-level modeling capabilities in 2011 because the use of the simulations in strategic analysis was criticized as “slow, manpower-intensive, opaque, difficult to explain because of its dependence on complex models, inflexible, and weak in dealing with uncertainty.”

NOTES

[1] Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987), p. 195.