A Simple Ratio Came to Influence Military Strategy
wsj.com
wsj.com
If you have a combat sim and it doesn't reward hills/mountains for defense, then you are playing a space sim.
It doesn't matter how big your force is if you can only get a trickle going into battle. Then you will constantly be outnumbered where it matters.
Similarly, in urban combat it's very hard to actually get a 3:1 effective concentration when you are moving in on someone else.
As mentioned elsewhere, it's also a very rough starting point assuming open terrain. If the defender is defending extremely easily defensible terrain, such as cities you're not prepared to just outright level to kill them, you need to adjust the ratio upward as appropriate. As with anything, you're supposed to exercise some discretion and judgment as a commander, otherwise what the heck are they paying you for if the job could be done equally well by a spreadsheet?
Like a lot of things, the simple rule might have been better than what came before it, yet still get you in trouble if you believe it too literally.
Russia didn’t pay attention and Ukraine spent the last decade getting extremely prepared for exactly this.
The Donbass war started in the following months, with many of the "separatists" and "volunteers" coming from Russia, including early leaders like Girkin-Strelkov (a GRU officer).
> 8. It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.
You don't have enough forces to overwhelm with a direct attack, but you have enough that you can send half to another location (perhaps a flank attack), while still holding your current position.
And so the method of employing the military—
When ten to one, surround them.
When five to one, attack them.
When two to one, do battle with them.
When matched, then divide them.
When fewer, then defend against them.
When inadequate, then avoid them.
Thus a small enemy's tenacity ~
ls a large enemy's catch. ~
A long line of tanks on a road is a nice show of strength if all you expect is unorganized and ill-equipped civilian resistance.
Of course, we have no way of knowing if this rumor is true, at least not for now. It would also explain the many arrests of FSB agents so far this year.
I think it’s safe to say that the will of a defender called to defend their homeland versus that of a soldier who spent a month in a muddy trench unaware that he was going to take the offensive part in an invasion - is going to be quite different.
Shortly before sunset Atahualpa left the armed warriors who had accompanied him on an open meadow about half a mile outside Cajamarca. His immediate party still numbered over seven thousand but were unarmed except for small battle axes intended for show.
However, the shock of the Spanish attack —coupled with the spiritual significance of losing the Sapa Inca and most of his commanders in one blow—apparently shattered the army's morale, throwing its ranks into terror and initiating a massive rout.
Cortes had lots of local help against the Aztecs. (Other tribes didn't much like the Aztecs. Cortes started a preference cascade.)
What certainly helped him was something unintended - the bloody civil war of succession between Atahualpa and Huascar that sapped a lot of strength and cohesion from the empire. Contemporaries described the main battlefield of that civil war as "full of bones as far as an eye can see".
The 3:1 force ratio concept is far older than Risk, Risk doesn't have a fixed 3:1 dice ratio (3:1 is the maximum dice ratio the attacker can have, and requires 3 or more attacking armies and only one defending army), and to reflect the force ratio concept achieving a 1:1 dice ratio should require a 3:1 (or slightly lower, since in Risk ties go to defender, so even dice isn't exactly even) force ratio rather than getting a dice ratio between 1:1 and 3:2 for an equal force ratio, as Risk currently does.
In Risk, the attacker gets 3 dice to the defender's 2, but the defender wins in a tie. It is actually an interesting mechanic -- the defender has a big advantage if it becomes a 2v2 on the dice, but the attacker has an advantage while the have the extra die. So, for large battles the attacker has an advantage, while small ones lean toward the defender.
Here's someone who did a simulation and made a table. The interesting bit is the diagonal -- even sized armies. They didn't go far enough, but eyeballing it, I suspect it would swap over to an attacker advantage around ~10v10-ish.
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2h224y/requ...
Tough luck, I guess.
Perhaps even better would be to convince half of the military attacking was the winning strategy and half that not playing is the winning strategy would be even better, but also much harder.
For humanity, perhaps not playing is optimal. For WOPR, definitely not. Same goes for a lot of military careers.
TL;DR defender advantage is vastly overstated although still a factor, and probably larger than historical in this conflict.
In recent wars, the emphasis on precision has been highlighted toward avoiding civilian casualties. The thing I hadn't fully appreciated is that in all-out conventional warfare, that same property makes weapons far more effective and efficient. A drone that can carefully drop a hand grenade into a trench can be more effective than an artillery unit walking salvos across the terrain near the trench.
In the long run, the ratios will probably turn out to be roughly the same as they have always been, for combatants with equal technology. Properly accounting for asymmetric technology, however, is apt to be quite challenging.
Unfortunately, none of these innovations intrinsically make war any less horrible.
The "reduced civilian casualties" angle gets emphasis in the popular press. On the military side, precision weapons were developed for greater combat effectiveness.
See for example this 2010 article from Air Force Magazine, "The Emergence of Smart Bombs":
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0310bombs/
It recounts how hundreds of Vietnam War sorties with "dumb" bombs by the Americans failed to take down a sturdy Vietnamese bridge that was ultimately destroyed by one sortie with laser-guided bombs. That enormous increase in danger to designated targets was the main point of guidance. The reduction of danger to untargeted nearby terrain was just the happy corollary.
Quoting the above article:
“For point targets and in good weather conditions, these weapons had nearly a single-shot kill probability,” said Gen. William W. Momyer, former commander of 7th Air Force, in his book Airpower in Three Wars. “If the target could be seen and the target was vulnerable to the explosive power of the weapon, the probability of damage with a single weapon was 80 to 90 percent.”
In the first three months of Linebacker, the Air Force destroyed more than 100 bridges with precision-guided munitions. An Air Force study found that laser-guided bombs were “100 to 200 times as effective as conventional bombs against very hard targets and 20 to 40 times more effective against soft and area targets.”
In terms of combat effectiveness it was like turning a single bomber into a whole bomber squadron.