I will be speaking at Historicon in Lancaster, PA., Friday 12 July. Historicon is one of the three major annual wargaming conventions run by the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society (HMGS). It will be run from 10 July-14 July, 2019. Their website is here: https://www.hmgs.org/general/custom.asp?page=HconHome
As part of this large convention, they have organized a “War College.” This is an impressive effort that includes 18 lectures on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I have the last lecture on Friday, from 6 – 7 PM. The speakers for this series include published authors Paul Westermeyer, Pete Panzeri, Steve R. Waddell and John Prados, among others. Lecture descriptions are here: . https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.hmgs.org/resource/resmgr/historicon/hcon_19/pels/19_war_college_pel_6-19-2019.pdf
I will be doing a presentation similar to the one I did at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS). It is on War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat.
From January through April we ended up doing more than two dozen blog posts on the issue of validation. I also addressed the subject in my book War by Numbers (Chapter 18: Modeling Warfare). It is, of course, an issue I have writing about since 1997 with my article in Volume I, No. 4 of our modeling newsletter (here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm). We also did a number of efforts inside of the DOD to promote validation, the most significant being our Casualty Estimation Methodologies Study (May 2005) (see: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm). This report resulted in at least one manager at one agency recommending that we be terminated from all contracts with them because we criticized their models. The response to all this discussion was underwhelming to say the least, until now:
And then out of the blue, here comes the Senate Armed Services Committee report. We have no idea where this came from, who did it, or why? Were they reading our blog?
Back in 2001 we did our first report on urban warfare. It was followed by three two others. It was the report that forced RAND to completely reverse revise their position on urban war. Report is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/urbanwar.pdf
Our three urban warfare reports are the basis for two chapters in my book War by Numbers. They are Chapter 16: Urban Legends and Chapter 17: The Use of Case Studies. I did brief it in several forums inside of DOD back in the early 2000s. I did consider at one point doing a separate book on urban warfare, but the interest in the subject appeared to be waning and we switched our work to examining insurgencies. I did brief part of Chapter 16 in my presentation at NYMAS (but the podcast has not been posted yet).
Urban warfare now seems to be a major topic once again. There are a number of sites and links that reference many reports, articles and studies on the subject. What is curious is that our original reports nor is my book listed on most of these sites. Our original urban warfare report was significant enough to help answer the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) questions about modeling urban fighting in their simulations and to cause RAND to issue out a revised urban warfare report based upon our report. Yet, it is not significant enough to be listed on these various reference sites. Is it because it does not provide the answer that some people want to see?
We did put the data we used for this analysis in our appendices to these reports. This resulted in one student at the Naval Postgraduate School putting out a report called “Analyzing the Effects of Urban Combat on Daily Casualty Rates.” Basically, he reworked our analysis using the data in the appendices. So he looked at 253 battles, of which 96 occurred in urban areas. The link to that report is here: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a424898.pdf
It was work done by a graduate student named Hakan Yazilitas (First Lieutenant, Turkish Army). It was for his master of science in operations research. According to his abstract:
Hypothesis tests are used to find if the DCR [Daily Casualty Rate] is different in urban operations. A linear regression model is constructed to predict outcomes of similar engagements and to see the effect of each variable. It is conluded that the attacker’s daily casualty rate is, on average, lower in urban operations. Terrain and force ratio are the most effective drivers of the daily casualty rate.
I am thanked in the acknowledgments, although I don’t recall what I did to help.
A few things of note:
The chart on page xvii is cool (track urban vs non-urban losses).
The graph on page 7 is cool (shows daily casualty rates from attacking and defenders from 1600 to present).
Urban Legends is the title of Chapter 16 of my book War by Numbers. It is one of two chapters in the book that discusses our three urban warfare studies.
“First, in what kinds of urban operations will the U.S. military be involved?
“Second, in irregular urban combat what will be the role of U.S. forces?
“Finally, in thinking about deterring and fighting peer adversaries is enough attention being paid to defensive urban operations…”
It then states:
This leads to a larger point. Much of the area in Eastern Europe where U.S. forces could play a key roles in deterring Russian aggression has no large urban centers….Thus, before going all-in on optimizing for urban operations, the U.S. military should take a deep breath for a moment and think carefully about future operations within the context of the National Defense Strategy.
Our first urban warfare study is dated 11 January 2002 and has been on our website since that time (see: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipubs.htm). To quote from page 78 of this study (bolding not in original):
The primary result of urban terrain…is to reduce advance rates significantly, reduce casualties to some extent and, as a result, to extend the duration of combat….the vast majority of urban terrain encountered will be flanked by non-urban terrain. Operations in these non-urban flanks will potentially advance at a pace two to four times that of the urban operations…This will, of course, result in either the defender withdrawing from the urban terrain, which is what traditionally had occurred, or an assault and eventual mop-up operation by the attacker of the enveloped defenders….
On the other hand, it is possible that one could encounter a situation where the urban terrain could not be bypasses or securely enveloped. The most notable example of such a scenario would be in South Korea, where Seoul, anchored to the west (left flank) by the sea, extends for some 25 kilometers inland and is then flanked east (right) by a substantial mountain range. While this is an important case of US defense planning purposes, it is one of the few hot spots in the world where this situation is found. An examination of an atlas shows few other cities in the world that cannot be bypassed or enveloped.
This discussion, naturally, is repeated in my book War by Numbers, on pages 251-254 in a section called “The Impact of Urban Terrain on Operations.”
A couple of our posts on Breakpoints (forced changes in posture) are getting a lot of hits lately. Not sure why or by who. Let me list all of our posts addressing the issue of breakpoints:
Most of our work at The Dupuy Institute involved contracts from the U.S. Government. These were often six digit efforts. So for example, the Kursk Data Base was funded for three years (1993-1996) and involved a dozen people. The Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB) was actually a larger effort (1987-1990). Our various combat databases like DLEDB, BODB and BaDB were created by us independent of any contractual effort. They were originally based upon the LWDB (that became CHASE), the work we did on Kursk and Ardennes, the engagements we added because of our Urban Warfare studies, our Enemy Prisoner of War Capture Rates studies, our Situational Awareness study, our internal validation efforts, several modeling related contracts from Boeing, etc. All of these were expanded and modified bit-by-bit as a result of a series of contracts from different sources. So, certainly over time, hundreds of thousands have been spent on each of these efforts, and involved the work of a half-dozen or more people.
So, when I sit down to write a book like Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (based off of the Kursk Data Base) or America’s Modern Wars (based on our insurgency studies) or War by Numbers (which used our combat databases and significant parts of our various studies), these are books developed from an extensive collection of existing work. Certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars and the work of at least 6 to 12 people were involved in the studies and analysis that preceded these books. In some cases, like our insurgency studies, it was clearly more than a million dollars.
This is a unique situation, for me to be able to write a book based upon a million dollars of research and analysis. It is something that I could never have done as a single scholar or a professor or a teacher somewhere. It is not work I could of done working for the U.S. government. These are not books that I could have written based upon only my own work and research.
In many respects, this is what needs to be norm in the industry. Research and analysis efforts need to be properly funded and conducted by teams of people. There is a limit to what a single scholar, working in isolation, can do. Being with The Dupuy Institute allowed me to conduct research and analysis above and beyond anything I could have done on my own.
This extended series of posts about validation of combat models was originally started by Shawn Woodford’s post on future modeling efforts and the “Base of Sand” problem.
This post apparently irked some people at TRADOC and they wrote an article in the December issue of the Phalanx referencing his post and criticizing it. This resulted in the following seven responses from me:
This was probably overkill…..but guys who write 1,662 page books sometimes tend to be a little wordy.
While it is very important to identify a problem, it is also helpful to show the way forward. Therefore, I decided to discuss what data bases were available for validation. After all, I would like to see the modeling and simulation efforts to move forward (and right now, they seem to be moving backward). This led to the following nine posts:
There were also a few other validation issues that had come to mind while I was writing these blog posts, so this led to the following series of three posts:
That kind of ends this discussion on validation. It kept me busy for while. Not sure if you were entertained or informed by it. It is time for me to move onto another subject, not that I have figured out yet what that will be.
I will be presenting my book War by Numbers at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) today (Friday), 26 April, at the Soldiers Sailors Club in New York City. The announcement is here: http://www.nymas.org/
The format is that I talk for an hour or so, and then take questions for the next 45 minutes.
I will be presenting my book War by Numbers at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) this Friday, 26 April, at the Soldiers Sailors Club in New York City. The announcement is here: http://www.nymas.org/
The format is that I talk for an hour or so, and then take questions for the next 45 minutes.
I will be presenting my book War by Numbers at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) next Friday, 26 April, at the Soldiers Sailors Club in New York City. The announcement is here: http://www.nymas.org/
The format is that I talk for an hour or so, and then take questions for the next 45 minutes.
Back in 2001 we did our first report on urban warfare. It was followed by 
