The Laws of Combat?: Lanchester Reexamined

cupy a prominent place in the study of conventional warfare: they lie at the heart of many models of conventional combat, they appear to shed light on the quantity versus quality debate, and they provide a simple paradigm for understanding the dynamics of combat. The U.S. Department of Defense has used Lanchester's equations in many computer models developed from the early 1960s to the present.* Several protagonists in the quantity-quality debate, ranging from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to Steven Canby to William Perry, have made appeals to the authority of Lanchester's square law, claiming that it proves that quantity dominates quality.2 In a recent publication, Lanchester's equations have been used in a model of the NATO-Warsaw Pact balance by defense analyst William Ka~fmann .~ The same model was taught by Kaufmann for several years at MIT, Harvard, and in seminars at the Brookings Institution, providing many analysts with a framework for evaluating conventional forces.

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