Now, the purpose of War by Numbers was not to create Combat Results Tables (CRT) for wargames. Its real purpose was to test the theoretical ideas of Clausewitz, and more particularly, Trevor N. Dupuy to actual real-world data. Not as case studies, but as statistical compilations that would show what the norms are. Unfortunately, military history is often the study of exceptions, or exceptional events, and what is often lost to the casual reader it what the norms are. Properly developed statistical database will clearly show what the norms are and how frequent or infrequent these exceptions are. People tend to remember the exceptional cases, they tend to forget the norms, if they even knew what they were to start with.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of War by Numbers is primarily focused on measuring human factors (which some people in the U.S. DOD analytical community seem to think are unmeasurable, even though we are measuring them). As part of that effort I ended up assemble a set of force ratios tables based upon theater and nationality. The first of these, on page 10, was in my previous blog post. Here are a few others, from page 11 of War by Numbers.
Germans attacking Soviets (Battles of Kharkov and Kursk), 1943
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Force Ratio                         Result                                   Percent Failure  Number of cases
0.63 to 1.06-to-1.00            Attack usually succeeds     20%            5
1.18 to 1.87-to-1.00            Attack usually succeeds      6%           17
1.91-to-1.00 and higher     Attacker Advances         0%            21
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Soviets attacking Germans (Battles of Kharkov and Kursk), 1943
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Force Ratio                         Result                                   Percent Failure  Number of cases
0.40 to 1.05-to-1                 Attack usually fails        70%           10
1.20 to 1.65-to-1.00            Attack often fails                  50%                     11
1.91 to 2.89-to-1.00            Attack sometimes fails        44%            9
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Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO) Data, U.S. attacking Japanese, 1945
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Force Ratio                         Result                                   Percent Failure  Number of cases
1.40 to 2.89-to-1.00            Attack succeeds            0%           20
2.92 to 3.89-to-1.00            Attack usually succeeds      21%           14
4.35-to-1.00 and higher      Attack usually succeeds        4%           26
Have total strength to force ratios been compared before, i.e. at what strength the attack usually succeeded in contrast to the respective ratio (and level)?
Another issue of course is to know whether these cases constitute typical engagements, but then again there may be no such thing as an outlier in combat, just missing context.
Not sure I understand the question. The process is described in Chapter 2 (Force Ratios) of War by Numbers and the actual data used in the construction of these tables is shown in the reference TDI (The Dupuy Institute) reports.
In the battles/engagements you reference above, are they all at the same “echelon” or are they a mix of sizes. Or do you believe that determining the combat power ratio normalizes the engagement so you can compare a battalion sized attack against a company with a regimental or division sized attack against a battalion?
And back to “usually” perhaps it would be better if the chart said:
Force Ratio %Attacker Success % Defender Success Cases
0.40 to 1.05-to-1 70 30 10
1.20 to 1.65-to-1.00 51 49 11
1.91 to 2.89-to-1.00 66 44 9
They are all division-level engagements. I broke up the old HERO databases years ago into separate company-level, battalion-level, division-level, and larger action databases. I also narrowed the length of almost all engagements to a day or less in the company-, battalion- and division-level engagements.
By the way, there are also drawn engagements.
Chris, the soviet and german force ratios are differing. Is this b/c of a lack of data? It also seems to have an influence on the failure percentage of the soviet forces.
Furthermore, the available PTO data suggest that force ratios are not very useful to interpret battle results. If a much better force ratio leads to a much higher chance of failure, something seems off. I assume this is also due to a lack of data?
Not an issue of a lack of data. All of our data was developed from primary sources (unit records) of both sides. Over time, I have assembled a couple of hundred engagements from the Eastern Front. I did reshoot that table using this expanded dataset but it is clear that the results were similar. The revised data will be in my new book More War by Numbers, which is currently on hold (as I am working on some other efforts right now).
The revised updated data is in this post:
https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2019/11/26/force-ratios-at-kharkov-and-kursk-1943/