These parameters are traded off with the firepower of each side. But what happens if the situation is somewhere in between? What happens if some portion of the force is visible to the other side while the rest of the force remains concealed? How does the level of situational awareness regarding the opponent’s targets affect the outcome of the battle? Kress and MacKay addressed this question by introducing a parameter representing the level of situational awareness present at each of the two sides. If B is the regular force and R represents the guerrillas, then the attrition equations are:Īs mentioned earlier, Lanchester’s aimed fire model assumes perfect visibility of targets on both sides, while the area fire model assumes none-both sides shoot “in the brown”, such that their effectiveness depends on the density of live targets in the area. As the number of guerrillas decreases with attrition, it is harder to acquire a live target and therefore the probability of hitting a live target decreases with this number. On the other hand, the regular forces are “shooting in the brown” and thus can only apply area fire on the guerrillas the effectiveness of the regular force depends on the density of the guerrillas’ live combatants. On the one hand, the guerrillas, who are well hidden in an ambush, or mixed in the civilian population, use aimed fire at the regular forces, who are fully exposed to the guerrillas. The first to capture this situation in a Lanchester setting was Deitchman, who developed a mixture of the direct-fire and area-fire models called the Guerrilla Warfare model. One such asymmetric combat situation occurs when regular forces of a state fight guerrillas or insurgents who apply irregular warfare tactics. Asymmetric engagements occur when the two sides apply different tactics. In all three battles described in Section 2-aimed fire, area fire and ancient battle-both sides apply the same type of tactics and firing techniques the battles are symmetric. A striking result characterizes the fate of such conflicts (see Section 6). Such multilateral conflicts lend themselves to game-theoretic situation, which we discuss in this paper. Consider a situation where several sides, Blue, Red, Brown, Green, etc., seek dominance in a region by fighting (or cooperating with) others. We call such conflicts multilateral conflicts. A third type of irregular conflict is when there are more than two sides competing for dominance. Such models describe many-on-one situations or scenarios where civilians have a significant effect on the way the conflict evolves. A second type of model relates to cases where the two sides of the conflict are profoundly different in terms of their force structures and their associated attritional dynamics.
One type of application includes Lanchester models in which the situational awareness capabilities on both sides are asymmetric one side can target better than the other and therefore gains an advantage. In this paper, we review recent applications of Lanchester theory to irregular warfare.
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