Have They Been Reading Our Blog?

From January through April we ended up doing more than two dozen blog posts on the issue of validation. I also addressed the subject in my book War by Numbers (Chapter 18: Modeling Warfare). It is, of course, an issue I have writing about since 1997 with my article in Volume I, No. 4 of our modeling newsletter (here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm). We also did a number of efforts inside of the DOD to promote validation, the most significant being our Casualty Estimation Methodologies Study (May 2005) (see: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm). This report resulted in at least one manager at one agency recommending that we be terminated from all contracts with them because we criticized their models. The response to all this discussion was underwhelming to say the least, until now:

U.S. Senate on Model Validation

And then out of the blue, here comes the Senate Armed Services Committee report. We have no idea where this came from, who did it, or why? Were they reading our blog?

Summation of our Validation Posts

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Christopher A. Lawrence
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.

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