Determining the Importance of Nationality on the Outcome of Battles Using Classification Trees

Abstract

Throughout history people have searched for a means of predicting the outcomes of battles. Data analysis is a way of understanding the factors associated with battle outcomes. There are objective factors such as force ratio and subjective factors such as leadership that affect battles. Subjective factors are hard to determine and thus are usually avoided in models. Here nationality is investigated as a surrogate for subjective factors. That is we want to see how nationality is associated with battle outcomes by exploring the best available data set on historical land combat developed by the Center for Army Analysis. We focus on four countries for which there is sufficient data: the USA Germany, Britain and Israel. We find that these countries historically use a substantial amount of military power to defeat their enemies. In particular, the USA often has overwhelming force.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA417497

Entities

People

  • Ali Cakan

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Artillery
  • Casualties
  • Civil War
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Sets
  • Descriptive Analytics
  • Mathematical Models
  • Military Organizations
  • Operations Research
  • Predictive Modeling
  • Second World War
  • Tactical Air Support
  • Warfare
  • Weapons

Readers

  • East Asian Political and Security Studies within the Soviet Union
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Organizational Psychology.