Mystics & Statistics

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.

Used Kursk Books

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.

Secretary of the Army, take 3

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:

  1. Graduate of USMA (West Point) in 1986 with a BS in Engineering.
  2. Masters degree from Harvard in 1995.
  3. PhD from GWU in 2008.
  4. Served as in infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division during the Gulf War (1990-1991).
  5. Over ten years of active duty (1986-1996?). I gather still in the Army Reserve as a Lt. Colonel.
  6. Chief of Staff of the Heritage Foundation, 1996-1998.
  7. Senior staffer for Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, 1998-2002.
  8. Policy Director House Armed Services Committee, 2001-2202.
  9. Deputy Assistance Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, 2002-2004.
  10. Director of National Security Affairs for U.S. Senate, 2004-2006.
  11. Executive Vice President at Aerospace Industries Association, 2006-2007.
  12. National Policy Director for Senator Fred Thompson’s 2008 Presidential campaign, 2007-2008.
  13. Executive Vice President of the Global Intellectual Property Center, and Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2008-2010.
  14. Vice President of Government Relations at Raytheon, 2010 to present.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Esper

Human Factors In Warfare: Diminishing Returns In Combat

[Jan Spousta; Wikimedia Commons]

One of the basic problems facing military commanders at all levels is deciding how to allocate available forces to accomplish desired objectives. A guiding concept in this sort of decision-making is economy of force, one of the fundamental and enduring principles of war. As defined in the 1954 edition of U.S. Army Field Manual FM 100-5, Field Service Regulations, Operations (which Trevor Dupuy believed contained the best listing of the principles):

Economy of Force

Minimum essential means must be employed at points other than that of decision. To devote means to unnecessary secondary efforts or to employ excessive means on required secondary efforts is to violate the principle of both mass and the objective. Limited attacks, the defensive, deception, or even retrograde action are used in noncritical areas to achieve mass in the critical area.

How do leaders determine the appropriate means for accomplishing a particular mission? The risk of failing to assign too few forces to a critical task is self-evident, but is it possible to allocate too many? Determining the appropriate means in battle has historically involved subjective calculations by commanders and their staff advisors of the relative combat power of friendly and enemy forces. Most often, it entails a rudimentary numerical comparison of numbers of troops and weapons and estimates of the influence of environmental and operational factors. An exemplar of this is the so-called “3-1 rule,” which holds that an attacking force must achieve a three to one superiority in order to defeat a defending force.

Through detailed analysis of combat data from World War II and the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Dupuy determined that combat appears subject to a law of diminishing returns and that it is indeed possible to over-allocate forces to a mission.[1] By comparing the theoretical outcomes of combat engagements with the actual results, Dupuy discovered that a force with a combat power advantage greater than double that of its adversary seldom achieved proportionally better results than a 2-1 advantage. A combat power superiority of 3 or 4 to 1 rarely yielded additional benefit when measured in terms of casualty rates, ground gained or lost, and mission accomplishment.

Dupuy also found that attackers sometimes gained marginal benefits from combat power advantages greater than 2-1, though less proportionally and economically than the numbers of forces would suggest. Defenders, however, received no benefit at all from a combat power advantage beyond 2-1.

Two human factors contributed to this apparent force limitation, Dupuy believed, Clausewitzian friction and breakpoints. As described in a previous post, friction accumulates on the battlefield through the innumerable human interactions between soldiers, degrading combat performance. This phenomenon increases as the number of soldiers increases.

A breakpoint represents a change of combat posture by a unit on the battlefield, for example, from attack to defense, or from defense to withdrawal. A voluntary breakpoint occurs due to mission accomplishment or a commander’s order. An involuntary breakpoint happens when a unit spontaneously ceases an attack, withdraws without orders, or breaks and routs. Involuntary breakpoints occur for a variety of reasons (though contrary to popular wisdom, seldom due to casualties). Soldiers are not automatons and will rarely fight to the death.

As Dupuy summarized,

It is obvious that the law of diminishing returns applies to combat. The old military adage that the greater the superiority the better, is not necessarily true. In the interests of economy of force, it appears to be unnecessary, and not really cost-effective, to build up a combat power superiority greater than two-to-one. (Note that this is not the same as a numerical superiority of two-to-one.)[2] Of course, to take advantage of this phenomenon, it is essential that a commander be satisfied that he has a reliable basis for calculating relative combat power. This requires an ability to understand and use “combat multipliers” with greater precision than permitted by U.S. Army doctrine today.[3] [Emphasis added.]

NOTES

[1] This section is drawn from Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987), Chapter 11.

[2] This relates to Dupuy’s foundational conception of combat power, which is clearly defined and explained in Understanding War, Chapter 8.

[3] Dupuy, Understanding War, p. 139.

Economics of Warfare 20

Finally, we have reached the last of Michael Spagats’ Economics of Warfare lectures. I first starting blogging about these back on December 22, 2016. If you have not read his lecutres, I strongly encourage you to do so. It is very nice primer on what studies are out there on the nature of insurgencies and terrorism.

 

This is the twentieth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. The lecture presents four studies. Of those, one study (Krueger) makes the argument that they do not (see pages 4-5), while three of the studies (Enders and Hoover, de Mesquita, and Benmelech) find a limited association (see pages 6-14, 15 and page 21 ). Some of these other three studies have to work pretty hard to make their point. One is left to conclude that while poverty may have some impact on degree of terrorism and recruitment of terrorists, it is probably not the main or determining factor. We probably need to look elsewhere for the root causes.

The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2020.pdf