Most of our work at The Dupuy Institute involved contracts from the U.S. Government. These were often six digit efforts. So for example, the Kursk Data Base was funded for three years (1993-1996) and involved a dozen people. The Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB) was actually a larger effort (1987-1990). Our various combat databases like DLEDB, BODB and BaDB were created by us independent of any contractual effort. They were originally based upon the LWDB (that became CHASE), the work we did on Kursk and Ardennes, the engagements we added because of our Urban Warfare studies, our Enemy Prisoner of War Capture Rates studies, our Situational Awareness study, our internal validation efforts, several modeling related contracts from Boeing, etc. All of these were expanded and modified bit-by-bit as a result of a series of contracts from different sources. So, certainly over time, hundreds of thousands have been spent on each of these efforts, and involved the work of a half-dozen or more people.
So, when I sit down to write a book like Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (based off of the Kursk Data Base) or America’s Modern Wars (based on our insurgency studies) or War by Numbers (which used our combat databases and significant parts of our various studies), these are books developed from an extensive collection of existing work. Certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars and the work of at least 6 to 12 people were involved in the studies and analysis that preceded these books. In some cases, like our insurgency studies, it was clearly more than a million dollars.
This is a unique situation, for me to be able to write a book based upon a million dollars of research and analysis. It is something that I could never have done as a single scholar or a professor or a teacher somewhere. It is not work I could of done working for the U.S. government. These are not books that I could have written based upon only my own work and research.
In many respects, this is what needs to be norm in the industry. Research and analysis efforts need to be properly funded and conducted by teams of people. There is a limit to what a single scholar, working in isolation, can do. Being with The Dupuy Institute allowed me to conduct research and analysis above and beyond anything I could have done on my own.
