What is Lethality?

Shawn Woodford did a blog post last month about Trevor Dupuy’s Definitions of Lethality:

Trevor Dupuy’s Definitions of Lethality

As he noted in a recent email to me:

I went back to look at the blog post on how TND defined lethality and it dawned on me that he actually stated it in at least two different ways:

AND

 

Well, I am not sure that Trevor invested a whole lot of time in the definition or discussion of the meaning of lethality. I did work directly with him for several years and I don’t recall it ever coming up in conversation.

I think lethality is both, the destructive power of weapons and the ability to injure and kill people. It depends on the weapon and what you are shooting at. Also, depends on the measuring construct you are using. Trevor Dupuy’s models, the QJM/TNDM, were focused on estimating human losses in combat. Other combat models are built around a SSPK (Single-Shot Probability of Kill) calculation and “lethal area” calculations. This certainly includes CAA’s  COSAGE/ATCAL/CEM and the RAND/CAA’s COSAGE/ATCAL/JICM hierarchy of models. This approach is oriented toward measuring weapons system losses. Their personnel casualties are then calculated from there. I think they are both trying to measure lethality, just using slightly different metrics.

Lethality is clearly not the same as combat effectiveness. There is a lot more to combat effectiveness then what comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Share this:
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.

Articles: 1455

Related Posts

10 Comments

  1. lethality (n.)

    “deadliness,” 1650s, from lethal + -ity.

    Bottom Line: capability to cause something to die (a person is killed, a person’s fighting capacity is eliminated?, a weapon is destroyed, a weapon’s functionality is eliminated?, a force is destroyed, a force’s functionality is eliminated?, an army is destroyed, an army’s functionality is eliminated?, a nation is destroyed, a nation’s functionality is eliminated?, a civilization is destroyed, a civilization’s functionality is eliminated?, …)

  2. Seems to me that the point of thinking about ‘lethality’ is that it is a relative characteristic of weapons themselves plus the environment and purpose being considered in their use in specific times and places – Then it is also a generalized characteristic of war or combat at a larger scale as Trevor noted in his study of the trends in combat lethality over centuries of combat.
    john s

    • This is one of the things I have faced when estimating lethality and assessing combat ratings of weapon systems, sort of “the evolution and natural selection of weapons on the battlefield”. These have to adapt (upgrades may prolong their life) to the environment, e.g. a tank which was designed for the pacific may not perform as well in the desert, while a vehicle specialized for Urban Warfare may show insufficiencies when deployed in a different theatre. Not to be confused with obsolescence.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *