A Study of the Effects of Terrain on Mechanized Combat Using the Janus System
Abstract
It has long been established that terrain significantly influences the way armed forces conduct combat. In order to best plan future U.S. force structure and weapon system acquisition, military planners must understand fully the influence of the environments in which those forces and weapon systems will operate. The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) performed this study to expand the body of knowledge regarding the effects of terrain upon modern tactical mechanized combat. The study had two goals. The first was to quantify effects known qualitatively by military planners and to observe heretofore unidentified differences between combat taking place in different types of terrain. The second was to derive tactical combat coefficients for the Variable Force eMployment (VFM) theater-level combat model developed at IDA. The Janus combat simulation was used to perform controlled experiments which they simulated 850 battalion-level engagements over digitized maps of real terrain in Central Europe, Southwest Asia, and Korea. Janus is an interactive, brigade-level, two- sided, stochastic computer combat simulation. It models fighting systems (e.g., tanks, helicopters, howitzers, and infantrymen) as individual entities.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1991
- Accession Number
- ADA244457
Entities
People
- David Gray
- E. S. Barnett
Organizations
- Institute for Defense Analyses