Category Conventional warfare

Future Conventional Warfare Scenarios

What are the U.S. Armed Forces’ potential conventional warfare missions?  Is conventional warfare gone, leaving the U.S. Army conducting special ops, training, coordinating air and drone strikes, providing counterinsurgency support, and generally just kicking down doors?

Well, there are still a few potential conventional warfare scenarios out there, even if they have a low probability of occurring:

  1. Korea: We still have the majority of the 2nd Infantry Division deployed in Korea as a reserve force for the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army. If a war blows up in Korea, then we are immediately right in the middle of a conventional war. It is 1950 all over again. Amid all the “fire and fury” type comments, I do consider this to be a low odds of occurring. Still, it is one conventional warfare mission that has existed since 1950 and does not appear to be going away.
  2. Taiwan: I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan (their third largest trading partner), but stranger things have happened. I believe we are informally committed to defend Taiwan if this happens. We have no ground troops there.
  3. Ukraine: We have no commitment to defend Ukraine. On the other hand, if Russia rolls across the border with tanks and is heading towards Kiev, then we may decide we need to intervene. Exactly with what forces we would use is a question, but this is potentially a mission in the future. I don’t think it is likely. If Russia was going to conduct a conventional invasion of  Ukraine, it would have done so in 2014.
  4. Baltic States: On the other hand, we do have a commitment to defend the three Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). They are members of NATO. Right now, with the forces currently in place, a Russian conventional invasion would sweep over these three countries in a matter of days. Then what? The U.S. would be challenged to be able to quickly move a single armored or mechanized division there, let alone the several divisions it would probably take to re-claim them. We currently are not defending them and do not have the ability to quickly re-take them. That said, the odds of Russia doing this is very, very close to zero, because they do end up in a war with 29 nations. This is probably not the best use of their time.
  5. Belarus: On the other hand, I don’t rule out tanks rolling into Belarus at some point in the future. Lukashenko, the Belarus dictator, is 63 years old, and these guys don’t live forever. Once he is gone, will Belorus undergo a calm transition of power to a new president (for life)….or does Russia take this opportunity to reclaim Belarus? Unlike Ukraine, there is not a strong nationalist group that is clearly ready to fight off any Russian invaders. If Russia did decide to take Belarus (probably making sure they were invited, like they were in Afghanistan in 1979), is there anything we could do about it? How concerned would we be about it?
  6. Georgia: Russian already had a five day war with Georgia in 2008. Russia probably could have overrun Georgia if they wanted to. They probably can now. It is a very small country and geographically isolated from NATO. I don’t rule out it becoming a battlefield in the future. Not sure what the United States could do about it.
  7. Iran: While I don’t think that the U.S. will ever invade Iran, I would have said the same thing about Iraq in 2000. Of course, Iran is a country with a population more more than twice that of Iraq. Invading Iraq in 2003 led to lots of long-term complications. Invading Iran might get even more difficult.
  8. The mission not yet named: The last 30 years are notable in that the United States has been dragged into three major wars rather suddenly. At the beginning of 1990, I don’t recall any defense analyst saying the United States was about to enter into a war with Iraq for the sake of saving Kuwait (who we had no alliance with). Yet, less than a year later, this is exactly what we did, and it was done with a large conventional force of nine deployed U.S. divisions. In 2000, I don’t recall too many defense analysts saying that we would soon be invading Afghanistan and Iraq. These missions came rather suddenly. So, one must always assume that there is a possible conventional mission at any time in any place. It has happened twice in the last 30 years. These are hard to plan for and to structure forces for, yet there is clearly a need for a mobile conventional force just in case.

Anyhow, that list appears to cover the possible conventional warfare missions for the United States right now. The one with the highest probability of occurring is “the mission not yet named.” There are many other flash points in the world, but most of them are not ones that would attract American conventional ground forces. Still, as shown by Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003, we can end up involved in a conventional conflict with very little notice. This is a far cry from the days of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were lined up along the border of Germany. The future ain’t what it used to be, to borrow a quote.

So Why Are Iraqi Records Important?

Last preachy post on this subject:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

So, why does it matter? Well, Iraq has been involved in three wars in recent time that are significant.

We engaged them in the 1991 Gulf War. Even though this was a truly lopsided result, we do not have good two-sided data available for this war (it may exist, but it is classified/closed). As this was our largest conventional operation since the Korean War (1950-1953), then having good two-sided data for this war would be useful. As it is, the last major conventional fight that the U.S. participated in where there is good two-sided data is in Italy through June 1944. After that, German records significantly degrade and we do not have a good collection of opposing force data for Korea, Vietnam or Iraq….although we do have it for Grenada ;).

Then we invaded and conquered Iraq in 2003. This was effectively a three-division operation that went extremely well also. As this was the last major conventional operation we conducted, it would be useful to have good data for the opposing side (hopefully we do, but again, it is classified/closed).

But, probably most significant is the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988. This was the largest conventional war since the early 1970s (India-Pakistan in 1971 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973). This was also the first major war that used chemical weapons since World War I (1914-1918). Chemical weapons and nerve agents were used extensively by Iraq against the Iranians, and also brutally against Kurdish civilians. Iran did make limited used of chemical weapons in response. It is also the only extensive use of nerve agents in warfare. This is probably important to understand and analyze. We do not have records from the Iranian side, so it would be nice to have records from the Iraqi side. Hard to analyze their operations if we have records from neither side. We really have no actual operational data on the effects of chemical weapons in combat since 1918, and we have no operational data on the effects of nerve agents in combat. This could be a major shortfall.

Now, the documents destroyed, according to the article we originally cited, was only the material captured during the 1991 Gulf War, with records dating back to 1978.  Some of it (at least 60%) was preserved on digital tapes. And, perhaps we have preserved all the military records we captured in 2003. So, in fact there may be an extensive collection available (at least 725,000 pages), although it is classified or closed to researchers. Based upon our track record of record preservation from Vietnam and onward, I have reason to be concerned.

Anyhow, a related link on our chemical warfare studies (including links to articles on the Iran-Iraq War):

Survey of German WWI Records

 

P.S. There are over a dozen counties in the world that still have chemical warfare arsenals, including Syria, Iran and North Korea.

 

The 3-to-1 Rule in Histories

I was reading a book this last week, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West by Karl-Heinz Frieser (originally published in German in 1996). On page 54 it states:

According to a military rule of thumb, the attack should be numerically superior to the defender at a ratio of 3:1. That ratio goes up if the defender can fight from well developed fortification, such as the Maginot Line.

This “rule” never seems to go away. Trevor Dupuy had a chapter on it in Understanding War, published in 1987. It was Chapter 4: The Three-to-One Theory of Combat. I didn’t really bother discussing the 3-to-1 rule in my book, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat. I do have a chapter on force ratios: Chapter 2: Force Ratios. In that chapter I show a number of force ratios based on history. Here is my chart from the European Theater of Operations, 1944 (page 10):

Force Ratio…………………..Result……………..Percentage of Failure………Number of Cases

0.55 to 1.01-to-1.00…………Attack Fails………………………….100……………………………………5

1.15 to 1.88-to-1.00…………Attack usually succeeds………21…………………………………..48

1.95 to 2.56-to-1.00…………Attack usually succeeds………10…………………………………..21

2.71 to 1.00 and higher….Attack advances……………………..0…………………………………..42

 

We have also done a number of blog posts on the subject (click on our category “Force Ratios”), primarily:

Trevor Dupuy and the 3-1 Rule

You will also see in that blog post another similar chart showing the odds of success at various force ratios.

Anyhow, I kind of think that people should probably quit referencing the 3-to-1 rule. It gives it far more weight and attention than it deserves.

 

Status of Books

War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat: For some reason, Amazon.com does not have a Kindle edition available at the moment (I recall that they did). I have talked to the publisher and they are looking into it. The paperback edition is for sale on Amazon.com and of course, University of Nebraska Press. I have heard that some people overseas have gotten copies, but other people are having a problem. I also have the publisher looking into that. There is one 5-star review of the book on Amazon.com. I don’t know the reviewer (meaning it is not a planted review).

Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka: The book has been selling at a consistent rate this year, and at that rate, it will be out of stock in the second half of 2018. If you are thinking about getting it, you probably don’t want to tarry too long. There are currently no plans for a re-print.

America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam: I do consider this the most significant of my three books, and of course, it is the one with the worse sales. I guess the study and analysis of insurgencies is passé, as we have done such a great job of winning these type of wars.

 

Against the Panzers

The book that came out of the A2/D2 Study (Anti-Armor Defense Data Study) was Against the Panzers, by Allyn R. Vannoy and Jay Karamales: Against the Panzers: United States Infantry Versus German Tanks, 1944-1945

The graphics person for of my three books and the images for this website is Jay Karamales. Jay is a multi-talented person whose primary occupation is a programmer. Apparently the challenge of writing a book while working a full-time job was stressful enough that he never tried it again. Unfortunately, there was never an Against the Panzers II, although I gathered he did some work on it.

For a taste of Mr. Karamales’ book, I recommend you take a look at his article in the TNDM Newsletter: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/v1n6.pdf

A2/D2 Study

A2/D2 Study = Anti-armor defense data study.

In the last days of the Soviet Union—before anyone realized they *were* the last days—the NATO nations were still doing all they could to prepare for a possible Soviet onslaught into Western Europe. They had spent decades developing combat models to help them predict where the blow would fall, where defense would be critical, where logistics would make the difference, what mix of forces could survive. Their main problem was that they didn’t know how far they could trust those models. How could they validate them? Maybe if they could reverse-engineer the past, they could be relied upon to predict the future.

To that end, the American Department of Defense (DoD) and (particularly) the British Defence Operational Analysis Establishment (DOAE) undertook to collect data about historical battles that resembled the battles they expected to be fighting, with the aim of feeding that data into their models and seeing how much the models’ results resembled the historical outcomes of those battles. The thinking went that if the models could produce a result similar to history, they could be confident that feeding in modern data would produce a realistic result and teach them how to adjust their dispositions for optimal results.

One of the battles that NATO expected to fight was a Soviet armored drive through the Fulda Gap, a relatively flat corridor through otherwise rough terrain in south-central West Germany. The battle that most resembled such an operation, in the minds of the planners, was the December 1944 surprise attack by the German Army into the Ardennes Forest region along the German/Luxembourg/Belgian border, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge for the wedge-shaped salient it drove into American lines. As the British involvement in this epic battle—what Churchill called the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Army—was minor, consisting of a minor holding action by XXX Corps, the DOAE delegated collecting the relevant data for this battle to the DoD. The responsible element of the DoD was the Army’s Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA), which in turn hired defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to perform the data collection and study. In late 1990 SAIC began in-depth research, consisting of archival reviews and interviews of surviving veterans, for the project which hoped to identify engagements down to vehicle-on-vehicle action, with rounds expended, ammunition types, ranges, and other quantitative data which could be fed into models. Ultimately the study team, led by former HERO researcher and Trevor Dupuy protégé Jay Karamales, identified and recorded details for 56 combat actions from the ETO in 1944-1945, most from the Battle of the Bulge; and the detailed data from these engagements was used in the validation efforts for various combat models. This quantitative data, along with a copious amount of anecdotal information, was used as the basis for Karamales’ 1996 book with his co-author Allyn Vannoy titled Against the Panzers: United States Infantry versus German Tanks, 1944-1945: A History of Eight Battles Told through Diaries, Unit Histories and Interviews.

Copies of this study are available at DTIC. If you put “saic a2d2” into a search engine you should find all the volumes in PDF format on the DTIC website. As an example, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a232910.pdf or http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA284378

 

$600 Book

I do note on Amazon that they are selling a copy of Trevor Dupuy’s Understanding War for $599: $600 book

This is not even the original edition, but the NOVA Publications reprint. I still have around 438 of these in stock at The Dupuy Institute for $24.95: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/booksfs.htm

That is $600 for a new book. They have two used ones for sale for $810.08 and $810.10. One wonders how they determined the two cents difference in price.

Anyhow, I do consider Understanding War to be the best of Trevor Dupuy’s 90+ books that he authored or co-authored. My book War by Numbers was heavily influenced by it.

 

Cost of Creating a Data Base

Invariably, especially with a new book coming out (War by Numbers), I expected to get requests for copies of our data bases. In fact, I already have.

Back around 1987 or so, a very wise man (Curt Johnson, VP of HERO) estimated that for the LWDB (Land Warfare Data Base) that it took 3 man-days to create an engagement. The LWDB was the basis for creating many of our later data bases, including the DLEDB (Division Level Engagement Data Base). My experience over time is that this estimate is low, especially if your are working with primary sources (unit records) for both sides. I think it may average more like 6 man-days an engagement if based upon unit records (this includes the time to conduct research).

But going with Curt’s estimate, let’s take the DLEDB of 752 cases and re-create it. This would take 3 man-days times 752 engagements = 2,256 man-days. This is 9 man-years of effort. Now 9 man-years times a loaded professional rate. A loaded man-year is the cost of a person’s labor times indirect costs (vacation, SS and Medicare contributions, health insurance, illness, office space, etc.), general and administrative costs (corporate expenses not included in the indirect costs, including senior management and marketing), and any fee or profit. Loaded rate is invariably at least 60% of the direct costs and usually closer to 100% of direct costs (and I worked at one company where it was 200% of direct costs). So a loaded man-year may be as low at $120,000 a year but for people like RAND or CNA, it is certainly much higher. Nine man-years times $120,000 = $1,080,000.

Would it really cost more than a million dollars to re-created the DLEDB? If one started from scratch, certainly. Probably (much) more, because of all the research into the Ardennes and Kursk that we did as part of those database projects. The data bases were created incrementally over the course of more than 30 years as part of various on-going contracts and efforts. We also had a core group of very experienced personnel who were doing this.

Needless to say, if any part of the data base is given away, loaned out, or otherwise not protected, we loose control of the “proprietary” aspect of these data bases. This includes the programming and formatting. Right now, they are unique to The Dupuy Institute, and for obvious business reasons, need to remain so unless proper compensation is arranged.

Sorry.

 

P.S. The image used is from the old Dbase IV version of the Kursk Data Base. We have re-programmed it in Access.

 

Dupuy Institute Data Bases

Yes, I still use data base as two words, much to the annoyance of Jay Karamales.

Anyhow, War by Numbers does rely extensively on a group of combat data bases that were developed over several decades. The earliest versions were developed in the 1970s and they were assembled into a large data base of around 600 cases in the 1980s. They were then computerized (they were originally a paper data base), re-organized, re-programed in Access, and greatly expanded. The data bases we currently have include:

Conventional Combat Data Bases:

LADB = Large Action Data Bases of 55 cases

DLEDB = Division Level Engagement Data Base of 752 cases

BLODB = Battalion Level Operations Data Base of 127 cases

CLEDB = Company Level Engagement Data Base of 98 cases

SADB = Small Action Data Base of 5 cases

BaDB = Battles Data Base of 243 cases from 1600-1900

 

We also have:

CaDB = Campaign Data Base of 196 cases. While the other data bases address battles, or engagements of no more than a few days in length, this one summarizes campaigns, often extending for months.

Finally we have three databases tracking campaigns from day-to-day. They are all programmed in Access:

ACSDB = Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (meaning Battle of the Bulge)

KDB = Kursk Data Base

Battle of Britain Data Base

These were primarily intended for model validation efforts.

We also have three insurgency/peaceeping/intervention/OOTW (Operations Other than War) data bases. They are:

WACCO = Warfare and Armed Conflict Data Base of 793 cases

SSCO = Small Scale Operations Data Base of 203 cases

DISS = Dupuy Insurgency Spread Sheets of 109 cases.

 

The DISS data base was the one that America’s Modern Wars is based upon. The other two were earlier efforts.

These links provides some snap shots of the data base content: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/dbases.htm

These are all company proprietary, although some have been released publicly in earlier forms or different forms (including the CHASE data base of 599 cases, the ACSDB in Dbase III and the KDB in Dbase IV). Our versions have been updated, including revisions to content.

War By Numbers Published

Christopher A. Lawrence, War by Numbers Understanding Conventional Combat (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2017) 390 pages, $39.95

War by Numbers assesses the nature of conventional warfare through the analysis of historical combat. Christopher A. Lawrence (President and Executive Director of The Dupuy Institute) establishes what we know about conventional combat and why we know it. By demonstrating the impact a variety of factors have on combat he moves such analysis beyond the work of Carl von Clausewitz and into modern data and interpretation.

Using vast data sets, Lawrence examines force ratios, the human factor in case studies from World War II and beyond, the combat value of superior situational awareness, and the effects of dispersion, among other elements. Lawrence challenges existing interpretations of conventional warfare and shows how such combat should be conducted in the future, simultaneously broadening our understanding of what it means to fight wars by the numbers.

The book is available in paperback directly from Potomac Books and in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.