I have signed a contract with Potomac Books (and imprint of University of Nebraska Press) to publish War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat. The book is already complete (as I now write books first and find publishers later). Publication date will be spring 2017.
War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat
Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)
Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
Does “War by Numbers III” expand on the previous “Numbers, Predictions & War” and “Understanding War” volumes with updated formulas?
No….it is built upon the various work The Dupuy Institute was doing for DOD. As such, it was independent of those previous efforts. A list of chapters is provided in the post War by Numbers III. At the end of the book I do go back and compare what we have done to the timeless, attrition, and advance verities of combat that Trevor Dupuy presented in Understanding War, and whether our work supports or contradicts what he presented. It is oriented towards statistically testing Clausewitz’s and Dupuy’s theoretical statements. We did not try to directly build from Trevor Dupuy’s work. It is a independent look at some of the same subjects that Dupuy addressed though.