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]
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).
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.
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.
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]
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.
Russia is claiming that it has destroyed all of its chemical weapons (I gather that there is no reason to doubt this, this has been going on for a while). The U.S has destroyed most its weapons, with complete elimination planned for 2023.
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.
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.”
Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka: Amazon.com is selling off its used copies of the Kursk book at $118.80. This is the first time I have seen them selling the book for below $200. They have eight “used-acceptable” books at 118.80. Another seller has a “used-acceptable” for $114.82. Amazon.com has six “used-good” for $120.04, seven “used-very good” for $121.28, and three “used-like new” for $122.51.
Kind of mystified how Amazon.com ended up with 24 used books.
On 19 July 2017 Mark Thomas Esper was nominated to be the new Secretary of the Army. This is the third nomination for this position, as the first two nominees, Vincent Viola and Mark E. Green, withdrew. Not sure when Congress will review and approve this nomination. I am guessing it won’t happen in September. The acting Secretary of the Army is Ryan McCarthy (approved as Undersecretary of the Army in August 2017).
Mr. Esper’s background:
Graduate of USMA (West Point) in 1986 with a BS in Engineering.
Masters degree from Harvard in 1995.
PhD from GWU in 2008.
Served as in infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division during the Gulf War (1990-1991).
Over ten years of active duty (1986-1996?). I gather still in the Army Reserve as a Lt. Colonel.
Chief of Staff of the Heritage Foundation, 1996-1998.
Senior staffer for Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, 1998-2002.
Policy Director House Armed Services Committee, 2001-2202.
Deputy Assistance Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, 2002-2004.
Director of National Security Affairs for U.S. Senate, 2004-2006.
Executive Vice President at Aerospace Industries Association, 2006-2007.
National Policy Director for Senator Fred Thompson’s 2008 Presidential campaign, 2007-2008.
Executive Vice President of the Global Intellectual Property Center, and Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2008-2010.
Vice President of Government Relations at Raytheon, 2010 to present.
Below is an aggregated list of links to Dr. 
