Tag Analysis

Lanchester equations have been weighed….

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There have been a number of tests of Lanchester equations to historical data over the years. Versions of Lanchester equations were implemented in various ground combat models in the late 1960s and early 1970s without any rigorous testing. As John Stockfish of RAND stated in 1975 in his report: Models, Data, and War: A Critique of the Study of Conventional Forces:

However Lanchester is presently esteemed for his ‘combat model,’ and specifically his ‘N-square law’ of combat, which is nothing more than a mathematical formulation of the age-old military principal of force concentration. That there is no clear empirical verification of this law, or that Lanchester’s model or present versions of it may in fact be incapable of verification, have not detracted from this source of his luster.”

Since John Stockfish’s report in 1975 the tests of Lanchester have included:

(1) Janice B. Fain, “The Lanchester Equations and Historical Warfare: An Analysis of Sixty World War II Land Engagements.” Combat Data Subscription Service (HERO, Arlington, VA, Spring 1977);

(2) D. S. Hartley and R. L. Helmbold, “Validating Lanchester’s Square Law and Other Attrition Models,” in Warfare Modeling, J. Bracken, M. Kress, and R. E. Rosenthal, ed., (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995) and originally published in 1993;

(3) Jerome Bracken, “Lanchester Models of the Ardennes Campaign in Warfare Modeling (John Wiley & sons, Danvers, MA, 1995);

(4) R. D. Fricker, “Attrition Models of the Ardennes Campaign,” Naval Research Logistics, vol. 45, no. 1, January 1997;

(5) S. C. Clemens, “The Application of Lanchester Models to the Battle of Kursk” (unpublished manuscript, May 1997);

(6) 1LT Turker Turkes, Turkish Army, “Fitting Lanchester and Other Equations to the Battle of Kursk Data,” Dissertation for MS in Operations Research, March 2000;

(7) Captain John Dinges, U.S. Army, “Exploring the Validation of Lanchester Equations for the Battle of Kursk,” MS in Operations Research, June 2001;

(8) Tom Lucas and Turker Turkes, “Fitting Lanchester Equations to the Battles of Kursk and Ardennes,” Naval Research Logistics, 51, February 2004, pp. 95-116;

(9) Thomas W. Lucas and John A. Dinges, “The Effect of Battle Circumstances on Fitting Lanchester Equations to the Battle of Kursk,” forthcoming in Military Operations Research.

In all cases, it was from different data sets developed by us, with eight of the tests conducted completely independently of us and without our knowledge.

In all cases, they could not establish a Lanchester square law and really could not establish the Lanchester linear law. That is nine separate and independent tests in a row with basically no result. Furthermore, there has never been a test to historical data (meaning real-world combat data) that establishes Lanchester does apply to ground combat. This is added to the fact that Lanchester himself did not think it should. It does not get any clearer than that.

As Morse & Kimball stated in 1951 in Methods of Operations Research

Occasionally, however, it is useful to insert these constants into differential equations, to see what would happen in the long run if conditions were to remain the same, as far as the constants go. These differential equations, in order to be soluble, will have to represent extremely simplified forms of warfare; and therefore their range of applicability will be small.

And later they state:

Indeed an important problem in operations research for any type of warfare is the investigation, both theoretical and statistical, as to how nearly Lanchester’s laws apply.

I think this has now been done for land warfare, at last. Therefore, I conclude: Lanchester equations have been weighed, they have been measured, and they have been found wanting.

Really…..Lanchester?

RAND described the combat system from their hex boardgame as such:

The general game design was similar to that of traditional board wargames, with a hex grid governing movement superimposed on a map. Tactical Pilotage Charts (1:500,000 scale) were used, overlaid with 10-km hexes, as seen in Figure A.1. Land forces were represented at the battalion level and air units as squadrons; movement and combat were governed and adjudicated using rules and combat-result tables that incorporated both traditional gaming principles (e.g., Lanchester exchange rates) and the results of offline modeling….”

Now this catches my attention. Switching from a “series of tubes” to a hexagon boardgame brings back memories, but it is understandable. On the other hand, it is pretty widely known that no one has been able to make Lanchester equations work when tested to historical ground combat. There have been multiple efforts conducted to test this, mostly using the Ardennes and Kursk databases that we developed. In particular, Jerome Braken published his results in Modeling Warfare and Dr. Thomas Lucas out at Naval Post-Graduate School has conducted multiple tests to try to do the same thing. They all point to the same conclusion, which is that Lanchester equations do not really work for ground combat. They might work for air, but it is hard to tell from the RAND write-up whether they restricted the use of “Lanchester exchange rates” to only air combat. I could make the point by referencing many of these studies but this would be a long post. The issue is briefly discussed in Chapter Eighteen of my upcoming book War by Numbers and is discussed in depth in the TDI report “Casualty Estimation Methodologies Study.” Instead I will leave it to Frederick Lanchester himself, writing in 1914, to summarize the problem:

We have already seen that the N-square law applies broadly, if imperfectly, to military operations. On land, however, there sometimes exist special conditions and a multitude of factors extraneous to the hypothesis, whereby its operations may be suspended or masked.

 

 

We May Not Be Interested in COIN, but COIN is Interested in Us

Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is the United States Army turning its back on the experience it gained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Retired Brigadier General Robert Scales fears so. After recounting his personal experience with the U.S. Army’s neglect of counterinsurgency lessons following the Vietnam War, Scales sees the pattern repeating itself.

The Army as an institution loves the image of the big war: swift maneuver, tanks, heavy artillery, armed helicopters overhead, mounds of logistics support. The nitty-gritty of working with indigenous personnel to common ends, small unit patrols in civilian-infested cities, quick clashes against faceless enemies that fade back into the populace — not so much. Lessons will fade, and those who earned their PhDs in small wars will be passed over and left by the wayside.

U.S. Army War College professor Andrew Hill found the same neglect in the recent report of the National Commission on the Future of the Army, in which any reference to stability operations “is barely discernable.” As Scales put it, “here is the problem with that approach: The ability to win the big one is vital, but so is the ability to win the small wars. We paid a price for forgetting what we learned in Vietnam. I hope succeeding generations do not have to pay again.”

The U.S. government appears to be repeating the pattern insofar as its support for basic research on insurgency and counterinsurgency. During the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. government invested significant resources to support research and analysis efforts. This led to some very interesting and promising lines of inquiry by organizations such as the Special Operations Research Office, and scholars like Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend, among others. However, as Chris Lawrence recently pointed out, this funding was cut by the end of the 1960s, years before the war ended. After, the fruits of this initial research was published in the early 1970s, further research on the subject slowed considerably.

The emergence of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led to another round of research and analysis funding by the U.S. government in the mid-2000s. This resulted in renewed interest in the foundations built during the 1960s, as well as new analytical work of considerable promise. Despite the fact that these conflicts remain unresolved, this resourcing dried up once more by 2009 and government sponsored basic research has once more ground to a crawl. As Chris has explained, this boom-or-bust approach also carries a cost:

The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject. [America’s Modern Wars, 295]

The ambivalent conduct and outcomes of the recent counterinsurgencies generated hotly contested debates that remain unresolved. This is at least partly due to a lack of a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This state of affairs appears to be a matter of choice.

Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics

RAND Wargame
Source: David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson. Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016.

RAND has published a new report by analysts David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson detailing their assessment of the threat to the Baltic republics of conventional invasion by Russian military forces. The conclusions of the study are sobering — that NATO could do little to prevent Russian military forces from effectively overrunning Latvia and Estonia in as few as 60 hours. Their analysis should provide plenty of food for thought.

Just as interesting, however, is that Shlapak and Johnson used old-style paper wargaming techniques to facilitate their analysis. The image above of their home-designed wargame above should warm the cockles of any Avalon Hill or SPI board wargame enthusiast of a certain age. As to why they chose this approach, they stated:

RAND developed this map-based tabletop exercise because existing models were ill-suited to represent the many unknowns and uncertainties surrounding a conventional military campaign in the Baltics, where low force-to-space ratios and relatively open terrain meant that maneuver between dispersed forces—rather than pushing and shoving between opposing units arrayed along a linear front—would likely be the dominant mode of combat.

While they did state that they used rules and tables governing movement and combat based on “offline modeling,” it is very curious that they did not find any of the many sophisticated Defense Department computer models and simulations available to be suitable for their task. They outline their methodology in an appendix, but promise to provide a fuller report at a later date.

Why Men Rebel?

In the 1960s, there were two big-budget quantitative historical studies conducted of the causes of revolution. One was by Ted Gurr of Princeton University and resulted in the 1970 book Why Men Rebel? The other similar effort was done by a husband and wife team of Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend out at San Diego State University. They published their data and results in a series of articles and in 1972 in a compilation book (Anger, Violence and Politics: Theories and Research). Ted Gurr’s work is much more widely known, although in the 1980s when I reviewed both of their works in depth, I found them to be similar and of equal quality.

Both Ted Gurr’s and the Feierabend’s work was based upon measuring political violence, which was a very relevant subject back in the 1960s. I believe that both projects were U.S. government funded. They both collected extensive data on violence in every county in the world in the post-WWII era (their data cut off was in the late 1960s) and created an index of political violence by country. They then built a multi-variant regression model to try to measure what causes those levels of violence.

Although they were completely separate and isolated efforts, using different data collections, they ended up pretty much reaching similar conclusions (much like what happened with my work and Andrew Hossack’s work). They were both cross-national studies that tried to determine the level of political violence in a country based on a range of factors. Like with any extensive quantitative analysis, there were a lot of elements and interesting findings in this work. But, they both put front and center a “relative deprivation” hypothesis of the causes of political violence (and/or rebellion). Basically, what this said was that if things are going well, and then they start going badly, this creates the highest chance for ‘regime change.”

So, for example, in their data sample the rich (or developed) countries tended to be very stable. Very poor countries (undeveloped) were less stable. But the least stable countries are those somewhere between rich and poor that are getting wealthier (what they called at the time developing countries). They tend to be stable when they are economically growing, but once the growth stops, they become unstable. If there is any validity to this hypothesis (and there certainly was using the twenty years of data from around 1948 to 1968), then this leads to me to wonder about the long-term stability of Russia and China.

A summary of Why Men Rebel is here: http://wikisum.com/w/Gurr:_Why_men_rebel. As the summery notes: “(3) “Progressive deprivation” [the J-curve]–expectations grow [we expect continued growth] and capabilities do to, but capabilities either don’t keep up or start to fall (pg 53)–modernization, depression in a growing country, or other change could cause this. [What he wrote in 1970 about this describes nicely what happened with the fall of the USSR.]”

It would be interesting, in light of almost 50 more years of data since they did their work, if someone took their regression models and ran the last 50 years of data through them to see how they did. I always like to see a little model validation (although this is rarely done).

Iraq/Syria Intervention Scenarios

There are a lot of potential variables to consider in developing a casualty estimate for a potential large-scale intervention. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have floated various proposals to deploy 10,000 U.S. ground combat troops to both Iraq and Syria, with the most recent calling for 10,000 in Syria along with 10,000 Arab allies.

It is not clear if McCain, Graham, or Obama are assuming a U.S.-led ground offensive to be followed by the withdrawal of U.S. troops, or a ground offensive and an open-ended stability/peacekeeping mission. Nor is it clear if they assume an offensive against Daesh only or an attack on the Assad regime as well.

Potential ground offensive scenarios:

1. 10-20,000 U.S. advisors only in Iraq and Syria
2. 10,000 U.S. troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh in Iraq
3. 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria leading a ground offensive against Daesh only
4. 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 10,000 Arab coalition troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh only
5. 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 10,000 Arab coalition troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh and the Assad regime

A long-term stability and support operation in Syria would almost certainly require more than 10,000 U.S. and 10,000 Arab coalition troops, even if it were confined to areas currently held by Daesh, and even more if extended into former Assad regime areas.

President Obama’s Casualty Estimates

Well, looks like President Obama is giving out casualty estimates for a potential intervention.

That used to be our job.

His estimate was for “sending significant ground forces back to the Middle East”

The results were:

1. “…could conceivably result in the deaths of 100 American soldiers every month.”
2. “…could take up to $10 billion a month…”
3. “….and leave as many as 500 troops wounded every month in addition to those killed…”

“Mr. Obama explained that his refusal to redeploy large numbers of troops to the region was rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war. “

Clearly this was a worst case situation based upon some study or analysis done. Do not know who did the study and I not think the study is in the public domain.

This is clearly just applying the Iraq War model to the current situation. In the case of Iraq, we had over 100,000 troops deployed and were directly and often by ourselves engaged with a major insurgency. This was generating 100 deaths on some months. This is 1200 a year. We lost people at that rate for four years in Iraq (2004 = 849, 2005 = 846, 2006 – 823, 2007 – 904).

On the other hand, it appear that most people talking intervention in Syria and Iraq appear to be discussing training missions with some ground support. I do not think anyone is seriously talking about putting a 100,000 troops back in. I think most people are talking about 10,000 to 20,000 troops primarily as trainers for the Syrian insurgents, the Kurds and the Iraq government. This is in effect what we currently have in Afghanistan. Our post surge losses there are more like 100 a year (2013 = 127, 2014 = 55, 2015 = 16).

Needless to say, loss rates are tied to the force size. A force fully engaged of 20,000 is not going to suffer the same number of losses as a force fully engaged of 100,000. And, we are looking at missions that are primarily training and support, which should suffer losses less than forces that are fully engaged.

Of course, The Dupuy Institute did a casualty estimate for a peacekeeping force of 20,000 for Bosnia, and we have done a casualty estimate for major counterinsurgency force of 100,000+ for Iraq. An estimate for a training and support mission of 20,000 people would be much lower than our estimate for Iraq.