Data Used for the ARL Paper

This is a follow-up post to this on the work being done at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) by Dr. Alexander Kott:

The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare?

On page 9 of Dr. Kott’s paper provides the following table:

This is a sample of the data used for 8 weapons systems. He ended up using 195 weapon systems for his analysis. This is discussed in depth in his paper (referenced in his footnote 12): “Kott A. Initial datasets for explorations in long-range forecasting of military technologies. Adelphi (MD): Army Research Laboratory; 2019. 128 p. Report No.: ARL-SR-0417.” It is here:

https://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2019/ARL-SR-0417.pdf

These are all ground-based systems (no aircraft) that are either direct fire, or indirect fire systems using explosive rounds.

 

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P.S. Now the figure of a rate of fire of 30 for the house-mounted harquebusier got my attention, and no other muzzle loading weapon has a rate of fire above 3 rounds per minute. I did discuss this with Dr. Kott. He has a note in his papers that states:

MFS048: I consider the harquebusier (see Wikipedia “Harquebusier”) of the early 17th century (taken as 1620) as light armored at 160 J of protection and with armament that is an interpolation between a light harquebus (which they often could fire only once at the beginning of the engagement and produced about 1600 J KE) and a sword/saber that produced about 100 J per hack (see data for gladius in Note MFS005). I take this intermediate effect as corresponding to about 500 J, and assign an artificial projectile mass and velocity to account for this. I assume that the maximum rate of sword blows could reach 30 per minute.

Note, his figures are based upon cyclic rate of fire, not sustained rate of fire. This will be the subject of a future post.

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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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