never liked math

[z-warfare]

but it can be interesting:

<a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0606/0606300.pdf">

Lanchester combat models pdf </a>

</p>

Maybe goes to show 'hunting packs' of tanks can be good, but that there's a time and place for dispersal too?

[JasonC]

Known to be wrong the minute they were published, even of WW I, which they were meant to apply to. The wonder of it is that the mystique of utterly trivial math continues to give currency to the whole thing.

All they say is that if weapons are all in range and are all direct fire aimed weapons (no area effects), firepower and numbers/defense contribute equally, or combat power goes as their product. It thereby predicts that the more one side outnumbers the other, the more lopsidedly it will win. This is glaringly not borne out by actual combat history.

In WW I, it erroneously implied that packing in greater numbers would win with lower losses. In fact, the decisive fact about WW I was that almost all effective fire was area not aimed, and delivered by shooters with minimal signature, thereby basically immune to firepower reduction by outgoing fire. In the form of small numbers of well entrenched MGs and high caliber arty firing indirect. At the very moment when specific combined arms effects were proving they trumped any degree of numbers absolutely, and that packing in more men just multipled own side losses, this unmilitary manufacturer puts out his silly simplistic math saying the opposite - and people bow and scrape to it for 100 years.

It would be laughable if belief in it hadn't gotten several million people killed.

[z-warfare]

What got my attention in that paper was the distinction in 3.2 there between "aimed" and "unaimed" fire, or units firing from dispersed cover and units firing together, not the idea that it might be 'true' or anything close to a realistic model. It is indeed an extreme oversimplification, and i never realized it was accepted as anything more than a thought experiment.

[Corvidae]

Utter jibberish and crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

Its all baffalgab, and statistics

(94% of statistics are made up on the spot)

[z-warfare]

I will argue that 86% are made up, not 94%. Also, crap it certainly may be, but the point i got out of it was the difference between firing, essentially, from cover versus 1-to-1 confrontations... which i imagined might apply to the tank 'hunting pack' debate. If it's a debate. And heck, it just sounds cool... "Lanchester Combat Models"? C'mon!

Even if it is the phrenology of military science.