Attrition and Suppression: Defining the Nature of Close Combat

Abstract

An initial investigation of the nature of future close combat derived and tested two possible enduring mechanisms for the conduct of close combat - attrition and suppression. A suite of analytical tools, including closed simulations, wargames, mathematical analysis and historical analysis, was used to establish loss exchange ratios (LER) for a number of scenario variants. The LER was used as the primary measure of effectiveness to investigate the dependence of combat success on the composition of the combined arms teams and the dependence of combat outcome on terrain. The analysis concludes that attrition is the dominant mechanism in "open" terrain and suppression in "close" terrain and that this is likely to endure, while improvements in sensors and weapon systems will gradually change the terrain types that are considered "open" and "close". The utility of combined arms teams was demonstrated by a significant reduction in absolute casualties and LER.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA430723

Entities

People

  • Alex Ryan
  • Dean K. Bowley
  • Taryn D. Castles

Organizations

  • Defence Science and Technology Group

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Attrition
  • Casualties
  • Combat Simulations
  • Detection
  • Game Theory
  • Indirect Fire
  • Information Science
  • Land Warfare
  • Literature Surveys
  • Mathematical Analysis
  • Mathematical Models
  • Military Organizations
  • Operations Research
  • Simulations
  • Small Arms
  • Warfare
  • Weapons

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Maritime Combat Support and Expeditionary Logistics.