For any who have been enjoying the war gaming discussions, there is a treat for you over at Argghh! John brought his extensive professional experience to bear in an excellent post discussing the role of Lanchester in military modeling.

…Lanchester can be useful, at it’s most macro and most micro levels, when you are comparing forces which can be generally assumed to be at parity on the issues in contention. Oddly enough, that’s pretty much all that Lanchester was proposing.

Such as modeling force-on-force from a hardware perspective, to examine the effects of the hardware. It can also be useful for examining organizational structure and doctrine - again, essentially positing a peer opponent. If your hardware wins, and your doctrine wins, and your hardware *and* doctrine wins in a Lanchester world, you are going to probably fare well, within the confines of entropic events and effects.

Of course, that’s a very narrow set of bounds. And the consequences of bad assumptions about parity (and *your* basic competence and morale) are huge.

Read the whole thing.

Argghhh! was kind enough to link me a few days ago with some comments and I left the following on their thread.
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Thanks much for the link.

I was being a bit harsh, so let me clarify myself.

Mathematical laws of chemistry describe immutable dynamics of the physical world. I question whether combat has any similar immutable dynamics that are waiting to be mathematically modeled. The difference lies in the thinking adversary inherent in war, as opposed to the stable relationships of chemistry.

Maybe the mathematics of dynamical systems offers a way to account for this - I think this is why chaos and complexity theory get folks so excited - but I haven’t encountered it yet.

My second post didn’t claim Lanchester wasn’t useful; it argued that it was being used in situations where it wasn’t appropriate. The question wasn’t ‘is Lanchester useful,’ it was how often is it useful and in what cases? I was voicing my concern that Lanchester is rarely useful and sometimes used inappropriately. Not because it helps, but because it’s something concrete we can work with.

… of course it would have helped my argument if I had, I dunno, had an actual example to back that up…