Combat: A Computer Program to Investigate Aimed Fire Attrition Equations, Allocations of Fire, and the Calculation of Weapons Scores.

摘要

This paper describes and summarily documents a computer program called COMBAT, and it discusses in detail the methodological concepts behind that program. COMBAT is designed to investigate selected subsets of three aspects of the modeling of combat. The aspects considered are: formulas used to compute attrition in combat models, formulas used to compute allocations of fire in combat models, and formulas used to compute relative measures of force effectiveness that result from combat models. Three potential uses for the COMBAT computer program are as follows. First, it can be used as a research tool to investigate the characteristics and interrelationships of various formulas that compute attrition, allocation of fire, and force effectiveness measures. Second, code can be extracted from the COMBAT computer program (or this code could serve as a prototype) for use in other (more detailed) models of combat. Third, COMBAT can be used as a highly aggregated, stand-alone model of conventional combat. A copy of the code of COMBAT on a 5.25-inch disk (PC/MS-DOS format) is attached to the inside base cover of the paper. If this disk is missing, another copy can be obtained from the authors at the Institute for Defense Analyses.