April 3, 2003
TIME FOR THE IRAQI OPPOSITION?:
Lanchester's Law: Too Few American Soldiers? (John Allen Paulos, ABCNews, 3/30/2003)Lanchester's Law can be paraphrased as follows: "The strength of a military unit — planes, artillery, tanks, or just soldiers with rifles — is proportional not to the size of the unit, but to the square of its size."...If the units under discussion have planes, cruise missiles and the like, there is no comparison and Lanchester's Law is not relevant. With tanks and artillery, Lanchester's Law does come into play, and American qualitative superiority again easily wins the day.
It's only when we get down to the level of individual soldiers with rifles in house-to-house fighting that the balance becomes unclear.
It's here that Lanchester's Law suggests that American soldiers' smaller degree of superiority may not always make up for a potential Iraqi numerical advantage ...
An interesting discussion which makes a case for numerical superiority in urban warfare. Should we pause around Baghdad and wait for more troops? Press on now into the city? Develop contacts with the Iraqi opposition and get their help? Broadcast radio and TV into the city to demoralize defenders and persuade them to give up? Posted by Paul Jaminet at April 3, 2003 9:08 AM
Nice find, Orrin. I like Paulos' books and monthly column.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at April 3, 2003 9:57 AMTo my knowledge, the person who has done the most work on quantifying military strength is Trevor N. Dupuy (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963869272/qid=1049383717/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/103-8616456-9433447#product-details
)
He uses actual campaigns to calibrate a numerical model. He confirmed the square law you mention. He also comes up with conversion factors, to tell you, say, how many WWII Russian troops you need, to have an equal fight with how many WWII German troops; or how many infantry a Sherman tank is worth.
He came the closest to predicting the number of coalition casualties in Gulf War I. That is, he had the lowest published prediction. After GWI, he concluded that the Arab conversion factor, already low, was dropping toward spears vs. Maxim gun levels. I doubt that he is seeing anything in GWII to change his mind.
AUTHOR: Bob Hawkins
EMAIL: bobhawkins@rcn.com
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DATE: 04/03/2003 10:46:00 AM
AUTHOR: Bob Hawkins
EMAIL: bobhawkins@rcn.com
DATE: 4/03/2003 10:46:00 AM
PJ:
One of the disadvantages to the defender in urban warfare is the invitation to the invading force to conduct a defeat in detail. If the defense forces are spread out over the city then it becomes easy for a numerically inferior invader to achieve an overwhelming numerical advantage locally (in a particular neighborhood). The only way this kind of urban defense works is if the local population is strongly committed to defending the city, thereby increasing the defenders size so much that even local superiority is difficult for the invader and that the invader (for whatever reason) is unwilling to destroy the ubran area and its population. The assault on Aachen is often used as an illustrative example of what can be done if the town is not important to the attacker. I can discuss why Stalingrad is not a parallel to Baghdad if people wouldn't be driven blind by by boredom.
I think we can assume that this would not be a new discussion for the Pentagon war planners.
D'oh! I should thank Paul, not Orrin.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at April 3, 2003 12:43 PMAOG - I think you're right that what matters is concentration of force within rifle range -- and this can be obtained. We proved in Mogadishu that we can inflict casualty rates of 50-to-1 on typical paramilitary defenders even when we're underarmed and running out of ammunition; with help from the local populace, demoralized opposition, and our top armor & firepower, we should do better in Baghdad, barring Iraqi use of WMD.
Still, if more troops can cut our casualties in half, they may wait till mid-next-week for the 4th Armored ID to reach Baghdad.
Re: the Stalingrad vice Baghdad disanalogy. Give us a hint here, AOG - is it because the local population is *not* heavily committed to defense?
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at April 3, 2003 1:04 PMThere wasn't any local population at Stalingrad.
Paulos is, to be brief, a fraud. His book on reading a newspaper was silly beyond belief, notably his attempt to use statistics to absolve the Florida dentist of transmitting AIDS to Kimberly Bergalis.
He treated residence in a county as a risk factor for AIDS. There are seven ways to get AIDS (6, if you believe Orrin) and living in a county is not one of them.
GIGO.
Well, not a one of us is perfect...I believe his error is called the "ecological fallacy." Here is a nice explanation of same:
http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/~census/ecofall.txt
Of course. Anybody can fall for that. I'd bet millions of people would say I have about Arabs.
But I just post on blogs; I didn't present myself as an expert telling other people how to read newspapers. I just write for 'em.
Paulos is a fool, and, I suspect, his goal was not to enhance the public understanding of statistical analysis but to flog his own politics.
Mr. Cleaver;
One sentence summary: the defenders of Stalingrad had supply lines. The Soviets could push fresh troops, weapons and ammunition into the city. This will not be an option for the Ba'ath. This is another place where Hitler made a bad strategic decision for political reasons. The Germans would have done far better to just move on, accepting the risk to their supply lines in order to cut the Soviet ones. Stalingrad was to a large extent trench warfare that happened to take place in a city. The rubble prevented any Panzer style break through and the armies slugged it out just like WWI.
Another key difference was the Germans were on the clock – time was on the side of the Soviets. In Baghad, it's the Ba'ath who are on the clock. The US can afford to take its time.
Stalingrad is a fascinating subject. Two
battles, really, the defensive one along the
river; and then the trap that the Red Army
sprung on the German Sixth Army.
German intelligence failed to detect (probably
because they had concluded that Russia
was used up so they didn't look) a massive
new force that was brought up all around
the city.
Fascinating, but not every remotely comparable
to anything that could happen in Iraq.
The model you'd want to study there is
Breslau-Glogau or Berlin.
Not that I think the Iraqis are willing to fight
the way the Germans were, but the situations
are similar in many other respects.