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.
I do have an inquiry, I thought I am going to ask one of the most prolific writers about Kursk (it is difficult to get information from the Swedish Defense college and the old Institute forums are closed, I apologize if this does not belong here) and there is an issue that is presented in the axishistoryforum,
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=223935
“There are 8 books by Zaloga in the University of California San Diego’s research library including this Handbook. His influence continues. Among other flaws in his Handbook is that he compares Krivosheev’s Russian totally destroyed tank figures, rather than evacuated, with German Totalausfalle (including sent to homeland repair). Niklas Zetterling in his “Kursk 1943,” also on a UCSD library bookshelf, makes the same mistake. Many readers thus will continue to be misled by incomplete, faulty research.”
For my Kursk book I compared the total losses for each day for the Germans to the total losses for each day for the Soviets. These included destroyed, damaged, abandoned and broken down tanks. This was calculated by looking at total number ready-for-action on one day subtracted from the total number of ready-for-action the previous day. This I felt was the most meaningful measure. The only limitation is that you have to have the daily unit records for both sides. Not a lot of people have been able to collect these.
What a lot of people have done is count “destroyed” tanks. This is not as meaningful as about 40% of so of damaged Soviet tanks at Kursk were destroyed while the Germans had less than 15% destroyed (these are rough figures from my memory, the exact figures are in my book). Furthermore, the Germans often would not write-off a tank as destroyed in combat until weeks after it was damaged.
As for the forum, it is not shut down, it is just no longer accepting any new members because we were getting spammed and I no longer had the manpower to patrol and maintain it. You can still log in if you have your old log in name and password (or I could look it up for you). I have debated whether we should re-activate the forum.
Thank you very much, I was never part of the forum, I was just a “reader”, during the forums most active years I was still a kiddo…
Well, I have been debating re-activating it, but it was becoming less active already when it was suddenly flooded with spam. A blog is easier to administer.