Tag wargaming

The Military Conflict Institute (TMCI) Will Meet in October

TMCI logoThe Military Conflict Institute (the website has not been recently updated) will hold it’s 58th General Working Meeting from 3-5 October 2016, hosted by the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia. It will feature discussions and presentations focused on war termination in likely areas of conflict in the near future, such as Egypt, Turkey, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kurdistan, and Israel. There will also be presentations on related and general military topics as well.

TMCI was founded in 1979 by Dr. Donald S. Marshall and Trevor Dupuy. They were concerned by the inability of existing Defense Department combat models to produce results that were consistent or rooted in historical experience. The organization is a non-profit, interdisciplinary, informal group that avoids government or institutional affiliation in order to maintain an independent perspective and voice. It’s objective is to advance public understanding of organized warfare in all its aspects. Most of the initial members were drawn from the ranks of operations analysts experienced in quantitative historical study and military operations research, but it has grown to include a diverse group of scholars, historians, students of war, soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and scientists. Member disciplines range from military science to diplomacy and philosophy.

For agenda information, contact Roger Mickelson TMCI6@aol.com. For joining instructions, contact Rosser Bobbitt rbobbitt@ida.org. Attendance is subject to approval.

Trevor Dupuy’s Combat Advance Rate Verities

t-34_76_4One of the basic processes of combat is movement. According to Trevor Dupuy, one of the most important outcomes of ground combat is advance against opposition. He spent a good amount of time examining historical advance rates, seeking to determine if technological change had led to increases in advance rates over time. On the face of it, he determined that daily rates had increased by about one-half, from about 17 kilometers per day during the Napoleonic Era, to about 26 kilometers a day by the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. However, when calculated by the duration of a campaign, average daily advance rates did not appear to have changed much at all over 200 years, despite the advent of mechanization.

His research on the topic yielded another list of verities. He did not believe they accounted for every factor or influence on advance rates, but he did think they accounted for most of them. He was also reasonably confident that no weapons or means of conveyance then foreseen would alter the basic relationships in his list.[1]

  1. Advance against opposition requires local combat power preponderance.
  2. There is no direct relationship between advance rates and force strength ratios.
  3. Under comparable conditions, small forces advance faster than larger forces.
  4. Advance rates vary inversely with the strength of the defender’s fortifications.
  5. Advance rates are greater for a force that achieves surprise.
  6. Advance rates decline daily in sustained operations.
  7. Superior relative combat effectiveness increases an attacker’s advance rate.
  8. An “all-out” effort increases advance rates at a cost in higher casualties.
  9. Advance rates are reduced by difficult terrain.
  10. Advance rates are reduced by rivers and canals.
  11. Advance rates vary positively with the quality and density of roads.
  12. Advance rates are reduced by bad weather.
  13. Advance rates are lower at night than in daytime.
  14. Advance rates are reduced by inadequate supply.
  15. Advance rates reflect interactions with friendly and enemy missions.

NOTES

[1] Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987), pp. 158–163.

Fulda Gap?

Two Washington Post articles of interest. An article today on the “Suwalki Gap”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/20/this-tiny-stretch-of-countryside-is-all-that-separates-baltic-states-from-russian-envelopment/

And an older article on “6 reasons why not to worry about Russia invading the Baltics”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/12/6-reasons-not-to-worry-about-russia-invading-the-baltics/

 

Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics: The Debate Continues

CIA map from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.
1994 CIA map from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.

RAND’s wargame that explored a potential Russian invasion of the Baltic countries continues to feed a robust debate within the ranks of strategic analysts.

Michael Kofman assessed the premises of RAND’s wargame and expressed skepticism of the call for a buildup of American and NATO ground forces to deter Russian military aggression. Kofman argued instead that

The way forward is to shore up deterrence by punishment, which has been working just fine all these years. That means leveraging U.S. airpower and the Navy as a global force able to horizontally expand the theater of conflict and inflict colossal military and economic punishment on Russia should it aggress against a NATO member state. As a consolation to AirLand Battle warriors, perhaps we can call the strategy Air-to-Land Battle. It also means the United States must focus on mobility in theater and assets that counter, rather than match, the Russian military. This is why Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe, is right in arguing that the number one need is for Army combat aviation in Europe.  The United States should also revisit the nuclear toolkit, since the credible threat of nuclear escalation had always been an important pillar in deterring Russian aggression against NATO.

In rebuttal, RAND’s Karl Mueller, David Shlapak, Michael Johnson and David Ochmanek defended the focus of their wargame, arguing that “the whole point of the games was to explore, develop, test, and refine concepts, based on our best — and evolving — understanding of Russian doctrine, tactics, and capabilities, as well as NATO’s extant capabilities and options for enhancing them.” They take specific issue with Kaufman’s emphasis upon threats of post hoc punishment.

In contrast, deterrent approaches that depend upon threatening to punish Russia for occupying the Baltic states after the fact, as Kofman prefers, would be susceptible to Russian leaders imagining — rightly or wrongly — that these threats would not actually be carried out. Similarly, a threat by the Baltic states to wage prolonged partisan warfare against an occupying force might well lack credibility given the potential costs to the populace of doing so, especially against an occupier as ruthless as the one that razed Grozny. Leaving the Baltic states to fend for themselves in the event of an invasion would also represent a catastrophic failure by NATO to honor its Article 5 responsibilities.

A NATO strategy based on temporarily accepting the inevitability of an invasion succeeding and instead mobilizing an overwhelming force to counterattack against Russian forces and liberate the Baltic states might encounter similar skepticism in the Kremlin. It would depend on the alliance remaining determined to right the wrong through costly military action even after months of Russian reinforcement, propaganda, and subversion. Moreover, Moscow might well persuade itself that threats to use nuclear weapons in defense of Kaliningrad (which would stand in the way of a counteroffensive as a “nuclear landmine” in Kofman’s incisive turn of phrase) and its newly acquired territory in the Baltics would be sufficient to deter NATO from carrying through with a “we shall return” promise. Indeed, such an expectation could prove to be correct.

The arguments and criticisms made by Kofman and the RAND team are thoughtful, well-reasoned, and well worth the time to peruse. They also demonstrate the insight that wargaming can bring to strategic problems.

However, the question that comes to my mind is, what strategic interest would Russia serve by invading the Baltics in the first place? Even without NATO imposing extra costs through an active defense, occupying them would reap negligible, if any, political, economic or military advantages for Russia, and would likely impose significant costs in terms of damage to relations with the West. It would also entail an expensive military occupation and suppression of a potential insurgency. Unfortunately, wargaming the correlation of forces does not seem to be able provide a plausible strategic motivation for such a Russian gambit to begin with.

Is The Fulda Gap Rhyming or Echoing?

Probable Axes of Attack of Warsaw Pact. Taken from Graham H. Turbiville, "Invasion in Europe--A Scenario," Army, November 1976, p. 19.
Probable Axes of Attack of Warsaw Pact. Taken from Graham H. Turbiville, “Invasion in Europe–A Scenario,” Army, November 1976, p. 19.

One of the great historical “what if’s” of recent memory was the imagined clash between the military forces of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in West Germany. This scenario – particularly a highly anticipated massive tank battle in the Fulda Gap on the north German plains – dominated the imaginations of U.S. military members, politicians, academics, strategic theorists, think tankers, and wargame nerds from the 1950s through the 1980s. Endless amounts of attention and effort were spent examining, debating, and thinking through a hypothetical war that seemed terribly real and imminent to so many at the time, but which also abruptly evaporated from the popular consciousness with the end of the Cold War in 1991. For many who came of age in the 1970s and 80s, however, merely mentioning the Fulda Gap evokes a collective nostalgic recollection of the prospect of a handful of plucky and resourceful NATO divisions battling it out with hordes of Soviet tank armies under the specter of global thermonuclear annihilation.

With this in mind, it has been rather fascinating to watch the unfolding debate over what is becoming an imagined clash between the military forces of the U.S.-led NATO and a resurgent Russia in Eastern Europe. Strategic analysts, doing what strategic analysts do, wargamed a hypothetical scenario involving a Russian invasion of the Baltic States and a NATO military intervention. The results of the wargame suggested that the current balance of forces highly favors the Russians.

So, what should we make of this? Well, the designers of the Baltic scenario wargame don’t want to scare anyone, but…

It seems unlikely that Vladimir Putin intends to turn his guns on NATO any time soon. However, the consequences should he decide to do so are severe. Probably the best outcome — if the phrase has any meaning in this context — would be something like a new Cold War, with all the implications that bears. A war with Russia would be fraught with escalatory potential from the moment the first shot was fired; and generations born outside the shadow of nuclear Armageddon would suddenly be reintroduced to fears thought long dead and buried.

Wait, a new Cold War? Are you sure? Well, for some, the logic certainly points in a specific direction:

This means that the United States and its NATO allies need to be prepared for such an eventuality — and, better yet, prepared to such a degree that Moscow will recognize that pushing on the alliance will be too costly and risky to be worth trying. The U.S. defense budget request for next year (and accompanying commitments to further deployments in Europe), which is currently being used by the relevant House and Senate committees to inform their markups of the Fiscal Year 2017 defense authorization and appropriations bills, represents a major step forward in achieving this goal. It appropriately concentrates on the threat to U.S. and allied security posed by “great power” potential adversaries. It plusses up investments in key next-generation technologies in areas like space, unmanned systems, and cyber, while also preserving funding for the modernization of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. And it allocates $3.4 billion for the European Reassurance Initiative, while committing to reestablishing the permanent presence of an armored brigade combat team in Europe to strengthen the American posture there in the face of the most serious near-term threat to U.S. and allied interests — a resurgent and revisionist Russia.

For those of us old enough to remember, Baltic States is starting to sound an awful lot like Fulda Gap.

Are They Channeling Trevor Dupuy?

TrevorCoverShot

Continuing the RAND description of their hex boardgame:

Ground unit combat strengths were based on a systematic scoring of individual weapons, from tanks and artillery down to light machine guns, which were then aggregated according to the tables of organization and equipment for the various classes of NATO and Russian units. Overall unit scores were adjusted to account for differences in training, sustainment, and other factors not otherwise captured. Air unit combat strengths were derived from the results of offline engagement, mission, and campaign-level modeling.

This looks like some kind of firepower or combat power score, or perhaps Trevor Dupuy’s OLIs (Operational Lethality Indexes). As they say “systematic scoring” one wonders what system they used. Know of only one scoring system that is systematic (meaning the OLIs, which are based upon formulae). The subject is probably best summarized in Dr. James Taylor’s article on “Consistent Scoring of Weapons and Aggregation of Forces:” http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/v2n2.pdf. This is the same James Taylor who wrote the definitive two-volume work on Lanchester equations.

I do note with interest the adjustment for “differences in training, sustainment, and other factors.” That is always good to see.

Also noted:

Full documentation of the gaming platform will be forthcoming in a subsequent report.

Look forward to reading it.

Series of Tubes

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RAND has published a report on its analysis of “NATO’s Eastern Flank” (meaning the three Baltic states). The PDF can be obtained here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1253.html  Of particular interest to us is Appendix A: Methodology and Data (page 12).

RAND is using a hex board game with counters that appears to have strength and movement factors on them. This is Tactics II…Avalon Hill…..SPI. RAND does have their own combat model, JICM (Joint Integrated Contingency Model), so why are they using a hex board game? According to their article:

RAND developed this map-based tabletop exercise because existing models were ill-suited to represent the many unknowns and uncertainties surrounding a conventional military campaign in the Baltics, where low force-to-space ratios and relatively open terrain meant that maneuver between dispersed forces—rather than pushing and shoving between opposing units arrayed along a linear front—would likely be the dominant mode of combat.

The problem is that JICM does movement down to having a series of “places” that are connected by “links.“ These links are tubes of variable width, connecting between each “place”. So for example, there might be a tube between St. Petersburg and Talinin. All combat would occur up and down this tube, but there could be no real movement out of the tube. This is a limited and somewhat inflexible movement system that has been used in a few other models (SOTACA comes to mind).

Now, I gather RAND has the whole map of the world set up for JICM as a “series of tubes.” According a 1995 report, there were nearly 1000 “places” and 2000 “links” for the entire world. This does not give a lot of fidelity, as the map of Korea shows at the top of the post. I suspect the fidelity is such that there are few tubes in an area as small as Estonia.

Estonia is small. It is 17,505 square miles. This is smaller than West Virginia (24,038 sq. miles), and it is a lot flatter. But, somehow, they have managed to maintain an independent language of over a million speakers (1.2 million actually). This language has managed to survive for over a thousand years! I am always impressed by that. Their capital is only about 100 miles from several points along the Russian border. This is about the distance between Washington DC and Richmond. Now granted, it took several years to cover that distance during the American Civil War, but there was a significant Confederate Army in the path. Therefore, to examine scenarios, I suspect they needed a map of considerably more fidelity than JICM and its “series of tubes.”

War by Numbers III

The table of contents for the book:

—             Preface                                                                                    6
One          Understanding War                                                                 8
Two          Force Ratios                                                                          15
Three       Attacker versus Defender                                                      22
Four         Human Factors                                                                      24
Five          Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Italy                          27
Six            Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Ardennes & Kursk   40
Seven       Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Modern Wars          55
Eight         Outcome of Battles                                                               67
Nine          Exchange Ratios                                                                  75
Ten           The Combat Value of Superior Situational Awareness        83
Eleven      The Combat Value of Surprise                                           113
Twelve      The Nature of Lower Level Combat                                   135
Thirteen    The Effects of Dispersion on Combat                                150
Fourteen   Advance Rates                                                                  164
Fifteen       Casualties                                                                         171
Sixteen      Urban Legends                                                                 197
Seventeen The Use of Case Studies                                                 248
Eighteen    Modeling Warfare                                                             270
Nineteen    Validation of the TNDM                                                    286
Twenty       Conclusions                                                                     313

Appendix I:   Dupuy’s Timeless Verities of Combat                           317
Appendix II:  Dupuy’s Combat Advance Rate Verities                       322
Appendix III: Dupuy’s Combat Attrition Verities                                 326

Bibliography                                                                                       331

Page numbers are based upon the manuscript and will certainly change. The book is 342 pages and 121,095 words. Definitely a lot shorter than the Kursk book.

 

War by Numbers II

What is it about (these two paragraphs are from my proposal):

War by Numbers looks at the basic nature of conventional warfare based upon extensive analysis of historical combat. Never passé, conventional combat capability has been a feature of the current growth of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and has returned as a threat in Eastern Europe. This book attempts to establish what we actually know about conventional combat and why we know it. It also provides an indication of how much impact various factors have on combat. It is the next step in analysis of combat that goes one step beyond what was addressed by theorists like Clausewitz.

It is the nature of the scientific process that hypothesis and theories do need to be tested and challenge. In a sense, we are attempting to add that rigor to a field that often does not operate with such rigor. In a profession where errors in judgment can result in the loss of lives, a rigorous understanding of warfare should be desired. War by Numbers attempts to provide such an understanding.