Category War by Numbers

NYMAS in Manhattan on Friday, 26 April

I will be presenting my book War by Numbers at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) on 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.

There is a presentation on Friday the 12th of “The Grosse Importance of Kleine Krieg: Logistics, Operations, and ‘Little Wars’ in the late 17th Century Low Countries” by John Stapleton, U.S. Military Academy.

Dupuy’s Verities: Surprise

The Death of Paulus Aemilius at the Battle of Cannae by John Trumbell (1773). [Wikimedia]

The tenth of Trevor Dupuy’s Timeless Verities of Combat is:

Surprise substantially enhances combat power.

From Understanding War (1987):

Achieving surprise in combat has always been important. It is perhaps more important today than ever. Quantitative analysis of historical combat shows that surprise has increased the combat power of military forces in those engagements in which it was achieved. Surprise has proven to be the greatest of all combat multipliers. It may be the most important of the Principles of War; it is at least as important as Mass and Maneuver.

I have already written quite a bit on Dupuy’s conceptualization of surprise so I won’t go into it in detail here. These previous posts provide a summary:

The Combat Value of Surprise

Human Factors In Warfare: Surprise

Dupuy’s analysis focused on how surprise influenced combat power by enhancing the mobility and reducing the vulnerability of the side with surprise, and by increasing the vulnerability of the side that was surprised. In 2004, TDI undertook a study for the late Andy Marshall’s Office of the Secretary of Defense/Net Assessment to measure the historical combat value of situational awareness (more knowledge by one side than the other) and informational advantage (better knowledge by one side than the other) and how each of these factors related to surprise in combat. Chris Lawrence detailed this research and its conclusions in chapters 10 and 11 in his 2017 book, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat.

In general, the study found that both superior situational awareness and better information enhanced combat power, though perhaps not quite as much as inferred from the relevant literature. It also confirmed that surprise conferred an even greater combat power benefit, above and beyond that provided by battlefield awareness or informational advantages. It also suggested that the primary benefit of a situational or knowledge advantage in combat was not in achieving surprise over an enemy, but in preventing an opponent from achieving surprise itself.

These results, though quite suggestive, were tentative and more research is necessary. However, no follow on studies on this subject have been funded to date.

NYMAS on 26 April

I will be presenting my book War by Numbers at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) on Friday, 26 April, at the Soldiers Sailors Club in New York City. On the 12th there is a presentation of “The Grosse Importance of Kleine Krieg: Logistics, Operations, and ‘Little Wars’ in the late 17th Century Low Countries” by John Stapleton, U.S. Military Academy. The announcement is here: http://www.nymas.org/

Other TDI Data Bases

What we have listed in the previous articles is what we consider the six best databases to use for validation. The Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB) was used for a validation effort by CAA (Center for Army Analysis). The Kursk Data Base (KDB) was never used for a validation effort but was used, along with Ardennes, to test Lanchester equations (they failed).

The Use of the Two Campaign Data Bases

The Battle of Britain Data Base to date has not been used for anything that we are aware of. As the program we were supporting was classified, then they may have done some work with it that we are not aware of, but I do not think that is the case.

The Battle of Britain Data Base

Our three battles databases, the division-level data base, the battalion-level data base and the company-level data base, have all be used for validating our own TNDM (Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model). These efforts have been written up in our newsletters (here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm) and briefly discussed in Chapter 19 of War by Numbers. These are very good databases to use for validation of a combat model or testing a casualty estimation methodology. We have also used them for a number of other studies (Capture Rate, Urban Warfare, Lighter-Weight Armor, Situational Awareness, Casualty Estimation Methodologies, etc.). They are extremely useful tools analyzing the nature of conflict and how it impacts certain aspects. They are, of course, unique to The Dupuy Institute and for obvious business reasons, we do keep them close hold.

The Division Level Engagement Data Base (DLEDB)

Battalion and Company Level Data Bases

We do have a number of other database that have not been used as much. There is a list of 793 conflicts from 1898-1998 that we have yet to use for anything (the WACCO – Warfare, Armed Conflict and Contingency Operations database). There is the Campaign Data Base (CaDB) of 196 cases from 1904 to 1991, which was used for the Lighter Weight Armor study. There are three databases that are mostly made of cases from the original Land Warfare Data Base (LWDB) that did not fit into our division-level, battalion-level, and company-level data bases. They are the Large Action Data Base (LADB) of 55 cases from 1912-1973, the Small Action Data Base (SADB) of 5 cases and the Battles Data Base (BaDB) of 243 cases from 1600-1900. We have not used these three database for any studies, although the BaDB is used for analysis in War by Numbers.

Finally, there are three databases on insurgencies, interventions and peacekeeping operations that we have developed. This first was the Modern Contingency Operations Data Base (MCODB) that we developed to use for Bosnia estimate that we did for the Joint Staff in 1995. This is discussed in Appendix II of America’s Modern Wars. It then morphed into the Small Scale Contingency Operations (SSCO) database which we used for the Lighter Weight Army study. We then did the Iraq Casualty Estimate in 2004 and significant part of the SSCO database was then used to create the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets (MISS). This is all discussed in some depth in my book America’s Modern Wars.

None of these, except the Campaign Data Base and the Battles Data Base (1600-1900), are good for use in a model validation effort. The use of the Campaign Data Base should be supplementary to validation by another database, much like we used it in the Lighter Weight Armor study.

Now, there have been three other major historical validation efforts done that we were not involved in. I will discuss their supporting data on my next post on this subject.

Battalion and Company Level Data Bases

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the need and desire to model combat at the division-level has declined. The focus has shifted to lower levels of combat. As such, we have created the Battalion-Level Operations Data Base (BLODB) and the Company-Level Actions Data Base (CLADB).

The challenge for both of these databases is to find actions that have good data for both sides. It is the nature of military organizations that divisions have the staff and record keeping that allows one to model them. These records are often (but not always !!!) preserved. So, it is possible to assemble the data for both sides for an engagement at division level. This is true through at least World War II (up through 1945). After that, getting unit records from both sides is difficult. Usually one or both of the opponents are still keeping their records classified or close hold. This is why we ended up posting on this subject:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

And:

So Why Are Iraqi Records Important?

 

Just to give an example of the difficulty of creating battalion-level engagements, for the southern offensive around Belgorod (Battle of Kursk) from 4-18 July 1943 I was able to created 192 engagements using the unit records for both sides. I have yet to create a single battalion-level engagement from those records. The only detailed description of a battalion-level action offered in the German records are of a mop-up operation done by the 74th Engineer Battalion. We have no idea of who they were facing or what their strength was. We do have strengths at times of various German battalions and we sometimes have strength and losses for some of the Soviet infantry and tank regiments, so it might be possible to work something up with a little estimation, but it certainly can not be done systematically like we have for division-level engagements. As U.S. and British armies (and USMC) tend to have better battalion-level record keeping than most other armies, it is possible to work something up from their records, if you can put together anything on their opponents. So far, our work on battalion-level and company-level combat has been more of a grab-bag and catch-and-catch-can effort that we had done over time.

Our battalion-level data base consists of 127 cases. They cover from 1918 to 1991. It is described here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/data/blodb.htm The blurry photo at the start of this blog if from that database.

Our company-level data base is more recent. It has not been set up yet as an Access data base. It consists of 98 cases from 1914 to 2000.

The BLODB was used for the battalion-level validation of the TNDM. This is discussed briefly in Chapter 19 of War by Numbers. These engagements are discussed in depth in four issues of  our International TNDM Newsletter (see Vol. 1, Numbers 2, 4, 5, 6 here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm )

The CLADB was used for a study done for Boeing on casualty rates compared to unit sizes in combat. This is discussed in depth in Chapter 12: The Nature of Lower Levels of Combat in War by Numbers.

Both databases are in need to expansion. To date, we have not found anyone willing to fund such an effort.

The Division Level Engagement Data Base (DLEDB)

The Division Level Engagement Data Base (DLEDB) is one of eight data bases that make up our DuWar suite of databases: See http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/dbases.htm This data base, of 752 engagements, is described in depth at: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/data/dledb.htm

It now consists of 752 engagements from 1904 to 1991. It was originally created in 2000-2001 by us independent of any government contracts (so as to ensure it was corporate proprietary). We then used it as an instrumental part of the our Enemy Prisoner of War studies and then our three Urban Warfare studies.

Below is a list of wars/campaigns the engagements are pulled from:

Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905): 3 engagements

Balkan Wars (1912-1913): 1 engagement

World War I (1914-1918): 25 engagements

…East Prussia (1914): 1

…Gallipoli (1915): 2

…Mesopotamia (1915): 2

…1st & 2nd Artois (1915): 7

…Loos (1915): 2

…Somme (1916): 2

…Mesopotamia (1917): 1

…Palestine (1917): 2

…Palestine (1918): 1

…US engagements (1918): 5

World War II (1939-1945): 657 engagements

…Western Front: 295

……France (1940): 2

……North Africa (1941): 5

……Crete (1941): 1

……Tunisia (1943): 5

……Italian Campaign (1943-1944): 141

……France (1944): 61

…,,,Aachen (1944): 23

……Ardennes (1944-1945): 57

…Eastern Front: 267

……Eastern Front (1943-1945): 11

…….Kursk (1943): 192

……Kharkov (1943): 64

…Pacific Campaign: 95

…….Manchuria (1938): 1

…….Malayan Campaign (1941): 1

…….Phillipines (1942): 1

…….Islands (1944-1945): 4

…….Okinawa (1945): 27

…….Manila (1945): 61

Arab-Israeli Wars (1956-1973): 51 engagements

…1956: 2

…1967: 16

…1968: 1

…1973: 32

Gulf War (1991): 15 engagements

 

Now our revised version of the earlier Land Warfare Data Base (LWDB) of 605 engagements had more World War I engagements. But some of these engagements had over a hundred of thousand men on a side and some lasted for months. It was based upon how the battles were defined at the time; but was really not relevant for use in a division-level database. So, we shuffled them off to something called the Large Action Data Base (LADB), were 55 engagements have sat, unused, since then. Some actions in the original LWDB were smaller than division-level. These made up the core of our battalion-level and company-level data bases.

The Italian Campaign Engagements were the original core of this database. An earlier version of the data base has only 76 engagements from Italy in them (around year 2000). We then expanded, corrected and revised them. So the database still has 40 of the original engagements, 22 were revised, and the rest (79) are new.

The original LWDB was used for parts of Trevor Dupuy’s book Understanding War. The DLEDB was a major component of my book War by Numbers.

As can be seen, it is possible to use this database for model development and/or validation. One could start by developing/testing the model to the 141 Italian Campaign engagements, and then further develop it by testing it to the 141 campaigns from France and the Battle of the Bulge. And then, to test the human factors elements of your models (which if you are modeling warfare I would hope you would have), one could then test it to the 267 division-level engagements on the Eastern Front. Then move forward in time with the 51 engagements from the Arab-Israeli Wars and the 15 engagements from the Gulf War. There is not a lack of data available for model development or model testing. It is, of course, a lot of work; and lately it seems that the  industry has been more concerned about making sure their models have good graphics.

Just to beat a dead horse, we remind you of this post that annoyed several people over at TRADOC (the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command):

Wargaming Multi-Domain Battle: The Base Of Sand Problem

Finally, it is possible to examine changes in warfare over time. This is useful to understand it one is looking at changes in warfare in the future. The DLEDB covers 88 years of warfare. We also have the Battles Data Base (BaDB) of 243 battles from 1600-1900. It is described here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/data/badb.htm

Next I will describe our battalion-level and company-level databases.

Battles versus Campaigns (for Validation)

So we created three campaign databases. One of the strangest arguments I have heard against doing validations or testing combat models to historical data, is that this is only one outcome from history. So you don’t know if model is in error or if this was a unusual outcome to the historical event. Someone described it as the N=1 argument. There are lots of reasons why I am not too impressed with this argument that I may enumerate in a later blog post. It certainly might apply to testing the model to just one battle (like the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991), but these are weeks-long campaign databases with hundreds of battles. One can test the model to these hundreds of points in particular in addition to testing it to the overall result.

In the case of the Kursk Data Base (KDB), we have actually gone through the data base and created from it 192 division-level engagements. This covers every single combat action by every single division during the two week offensive around Belgorod. Furthermore, I have listed each and every one of these as an “engagement sheet’ in my book on Kursk. The 192 engagement sheets are a half-page or page-long tabulation of the strengths and losses for each engagement for all units involved. Most sheets cover one day of battle. It took considerable work to assemble these. First one had to figure out who was opposing whom (especially as unit boundaries never match) and then work from there. So, if someone wants to test a model or model combat or do historical analysis, one could simply assemble a database from these 192 engagements. If one wanted more details on the engagements, there are detailed breakdowns of the equipment in the Kursk Data Base and detailed descriptions of the engagements in my Kursk book. My new Prokhorovka book (release date 1 June), which only covers the part of the southern offensive around Prokhorovka from the 9th of July, has 76 of those engagements sheets. Needless to say, these Kursk engagements also make up 192 of the 752 engagements in our DLEDB (Division Level Engagement Data Base).  A picture of that database is shown at the top of this post.

So, if you are conducting a validation to the campaign, take a moment and check the results to each division to each day. In the KDB there were 17 divisions on the German side, and 37 rifle divisions and 10 tank and mechanized corps (a division-sized unit) on the Soviet side. The data base covers 15 days of fighting. So….there are around 900 points of daily division level results to check the results to. I drawn your attention to this graph:

There are a number of these charts in Chapter 19 of my book War by Numbers. Also see:

Validating Attrition

The Ardennes database is even bigger. There was one validation done by CAA (Center for Army Analysis) of its CEM model (Concepts Evaluation Model) using the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Bases (ACSDB). They did this as an overall comparison to the campaign. So they tracked the front line trace at the end of the battle, and the total tank losses during the battle, ammunition consumption and other events like that. They got a fairly good result. What they did not do was go into the weeds and compare the results of the engagements. CEM relies on inputs from ATCAL (Attrition Calculator) which are created from COSAGE model runs. So while they tested the overall top-level model, they really did not test ATCAL or COSAGE, the models that feed into it. ATCAL and COSAGE I gather are still in use. In the case of Ardennes you have 36 U.S. and UK divisions and 32 German divisions and brigades over 32 days, so over 2,000 division days of combat. That is a lot of data points to test to.

Now we have not systematically gone through the ACSDB and assembled a record for every single engagement there. There would probably be more than 400 such engagements. We have assembled 57 engagements from the Battle of the Bulge for our division-level database (DLEDB). More could be done.

Finally, during our Battle of Britain Data Base effort, we recommended developing an air combat engagement database of 120 air-to-air engagements from the Battle of Britain. We did examine some additional mission specific data for the British side derived from the “Form F” Combat Reports for the period 8-12 August 1940. This was to demonstrate the viability of developing an engagement database from the dataset. So we wanted to do something similar for the air combat that we had done with division-level combat. An air-to-air engagement database would be very useful if you are developing any air campaign wargame. This unfortunately was never done by us as the project (read: funding) ended.

As it is we actually have three air campaign databases to work from, the Battle of Britain data base, the air component of the Kursk Data Base, and the air component of the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base. There is a lot of material to work from. All it takes it a little time and effort.

I will discuss the division-level data base in more depth in my next post.

Diddlysquat

This blog post is generated as a response to one of Richard Anderson’s comments to this blog post:

Validating Attrition

Richard Anderson used to work with me at Trevor Dupuy’s company DMSI and later at The Dupuy Institute. He has been involved in this business since 1987, although he has been away from it for over a decade.

His comment was: “Keep fighting the good fight Chris, but it remains an uphill battle.”

It is an uphill battle. For a brief moment, from 1986-1989 it appeared that the community was actually trying to move forward on the model validation and “base of sand” type issues. This is discussed to some extent in Chapter 18 of War by Numbers (pages 295-298).

In 1986 the office of the DUSA (OR) * reviewed the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency’s (CAA) casualty estimation process in their models. This generated considerable comments and criticism of how it was being done. In 1987 CAA, with I gather funding from DUSA (OR), issued out the contract to develop the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB). I was the program manager for that effort. That same year they issued out the contract to study Breakpoints (forced changes in posture) which I was also involved in.

So we had the army conducting an internal review of their models and finding them wanting. They then issued out a contract to validate them and they issued out a contract to examine the issue of breakpoints, which had not been seriously studied since the 1950s. This was at the initiative of Vandiver and Walt Hollis.

After that, everything kind of fell apart. The U.S. defense budget peaked in 1989 and the budget cuts started. So, even though the breakpoints study got a good start, there was no follow-on contract. The ACSDB ended up being used for a casual top-level validation effort that did not get into the nuts and bolts of the models. All the dozens of problems identified in the internal DUSA(OR) report resulted in no corrective action taken (as far as I know). Basically, budget was declining and maintaining hardware was more important that studies and analysis.

There was a resurgence of activity in the early 1990s, which is when the Kursk Data Base (KDB) was funded. But that was never even used for a validation effort (although it was used to test Lanchester). But funding was marginal during most of the 1990s, and the modeling community did little to improve their understanding and analysis of combat.

The nature of the missions changed after 9/11/2001 and The Dupuy Institute ended up focused on insurgencies (see America’s Modern Wars). Budget again started declining in 2009 and then sequestration arrived, killing everything.

The end result was that there was a period from 1986-1989 when the U.S. modeling community appeared to have identified their problems and were taking corrective action. Since 1989, for all practical purposes, diddlysquat.

So…..30 years later…..I am still fighting the “good fight.” But I am not optimistic. Nothing is going to happen unless people at senior levels fund something to happen. For the price of a Stryker or two, a huge amount of productive and useful work could be done. But to date, having an extra Stryker or two has been more important to the army.

For this year and next year the U.S. Army has increasing budgets. If they wanted to take corrective action….now would be the time. I suspect that bureaucratic inertia will have more weight than any intellectual arguments that I can make. Still, I have to give it one last try.

 

* DUSA (OR) = The Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). It was headed by Walt Hollis forever, but was completely shut down in recent times.

Engaging the Phalanx (part 7 of 7)

Hopefully this is my last post on the subject (but I suspect not, as I expect a public response from the three TRADOC authors). This is in response to the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6). The issue here is the “Base of Sand” problem, which is what the original blog post that “inspired” their article was about:

Wargaming Multi-Domain Battle: The Base Of Sand Problem

While the first paragraph of their article addressed this blog post and they reference Paul Davis’ 1992 Base of Sand paper in their footnotes (but not John Stockfish’s paper, which is an equally valid criticism), they then do not discuss the “Base of Sand” problem further. They do not actually state whether this is a problem or not a problem. I gather by this notable omission that in fact they do understand that it is a problem, but being employees of TRADOC they are limited as to what they can publicly say. I am not.

I do address the “Base of Sand” problem in my book War by Numbers, Chapter 18. It has also been addressed in a few other posts on this blog. We are critics because we do not see significant improvement in the industry. In some cases, we are seeing regression.

In the end, I think the best solution for the DOD modeling and simulation community is not to “circle the wagons” and defend what they are currently doing, but instead acknowledge the limitations and problems they have and undertake a corrective action program. This corrective action program would involve: 1) Properly addressing how to measure and quantify certain aspects of combat (for example: Breakpoints) and 2) Validating these aspects and the combat models these aspects are part of by using real-world combat data. This would be an iterative process, as you develop and then test the model, then further develop it, and then test it again. This moves us forward. It is a more valued approach than just “circling the wagons.” As these models and simulations are being used to analyze processes that may or may not make us fight better, and may or may not save American service members lives, then I think it is important enough to do right. That is what we need to be focused on, not squabbling over a blog post (or seven).

Validating Attrition

Continuing to comment on the article in the December 2018 issue of the Phalanx by Alt, Morey and Larimer (this is part 3 of 7; see Part 1, Part 2)

On the first page (page 28) in the third column they make the statement that:

Models of complex systems, especially those that incorporate human behavior, such as that demonstrated in combat, do not often lend themselves to empirical validation of output measures, such as attrition.

Really? Why can’t you? If fact, isn’t that exactly the model you should be validating?

More to the point, people have validated attrition models. Let me list a few cases (this list is not exhaustive):

1. Done by Center for Army Analysis (CAA) for the CEM (Concepts Evaluation Model) using Ardennes Campaign Simulation Study (ARCAS) data. Take a look at this study done for Stochastic CEM (STOCEM): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a489349.pdf

2. Done in 2005 by The Dupuy Institute for six different casualty estimation methodologies as part of Casualty Estimation Methodologies Studies. This was work done for the Army Medical Department and funded by DUSA (OR). It is listed here as report CE-1: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm

3. Done in 2006 by The Dupuy Institute for the TNDM (Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model) using Corps and Division-level data. This effort was funded by Boeing, not the U.S. government. This is discussed in depth in Chapter 19 of my book War by Numbers (pages 299-324) where we show 20 charts from such an effort. Let me show you one from page 315:

 

So, this is something that multiple people have done on multiple occasions. It is not so difficult that The Dupuy Institute was not able to do it. TRADOC is an organization with around 38,000 military and civilian employees, plus who knows how many contractors. I think this is something they could also do if they had the desire.