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A Simple Ratio Came to Influence Military Strategy
- fergbrain 4y agohttps://archive.ph/D398B https://archive.ph/D398B
- msandford 4y agoLike any good metric it's only good given some assumptions. Break the assumptions and you break the metric.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI wonder if this metric (3:1 to attack a prepared defender) was originally just a way of saying, "don't expect to win just because you outnumber the foe, if they are in a prepared defensive position". Because prior to having a simple metric like this, untrained commanders might have used an even more simple metric, like "I have twice their numbers so I can take this castle". Like a lot of things, the simple rule might have been better than what came before it, yet still get you in trouble if you believe it too literally.
- Arch485 4y agoI believe the 3:1 metric is to be taken literally with equally skilled/equipped forces (source: was in the military). The Ukrainian military is outperforming the Russian military and the Ukrainians have a ton of equipment the Russians weren't anticipating, so the 3:1 metric isn't working out so well.
- oneoff786 4y agoI don’t believe Russia had. 3:1 advantage though. I’m not even convinced they had more troops than Ukraine. The concentration of the troops was enough for early local differences. But they never had these kinds of numbers in, say, Kyiv.
- chrchang523 4y agoYeah, I remember hearing about "190000 Russian troops" at the outbreak of this operation, and thinking that that was an awfully small number given the size of Ukraine.
- oneoff786 4y agoUkraine was pretty pathetic back when Russia took Crimea. It probably would have been an easy sweep of kyiv and others at the time with those forces. Russia didn’t pay attention and Ukraine spent the last decade getting extremely prepared for exactly this.
- marcosdumay 4y agoUkraine was in civil war when Russia took Crimea.
- dimitar 4y agoThis is not true. The president had abandoned his post and ran away and much of the military and security aparatus was infiltrated by Russia, which left Ukrainian forces in Crimea surrounded in their bases, without orders and much of the gear disabled. The Donbass war started in the following months, with many of the "separatists" and "volunteers" coming from Russia, including early leaders like Girkin-Strelkov (a GRU officer).
- lupire 4y agoRussia attacked Crimea on 2014. In 2022, Russia attacked Kyiv and Kharkiv and other areas well outside of active separatist zones.
- oneoff786 4y agoYes. I’m saying had Russia attacked kyiv in 2014 I think it would have won. Idk if it would have been as practical to just swoop in via Belarus at the time.
- prennert 4y agoSun Tzu was even more pessimistic. > 8. It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.
- bee_rider 4y agoWhat does "divide our army into two" mean? Retreat, leaving half your army as a rearguard or something?
- lupire 4y agohttps://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/philosophy-religion/art-of-war/sun-tzu-art-warby-sun-tzu-5#fnt14 https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/philosophy-religi... You don't have enough forces to overwhelm with a direct attack, but you have enough that you can send half to another location (perhaps a flank attack), while still holding your current position.
- dark_star 4y agoIn the Art of War Denma Translation (excellent BTW!) the text says: And so the method of employing the military— When ten to one, surround them. When five to one, attack them. When two to one, do battle with them. When matched, then divide them. When fewer, then defend against them. When inadequate, then avoid them. Thus a small enemy's tenacity ~ ls a large enemy's catch. ~
- starkd 4y agoCould be attributable to corruption inthe military. It all looks good on paper, so they went with it. They also failed to account for the spirit of the military, and the leaders seem to believe in some romanticized notion of greatness. Detached from real world.
- rossdavidh 4y agoThe rumor is, the FSB (previously known as KGB) had been given funding after 2014 to bribe Ukrainian military officers to insure little resistance. Then, the FSB (thinking there was no way an invasion of Ukraine would actually happen) pocketed the money intended for bribes, and told Putin the bribes had been accepted. Thinking the Ukrainian top officers were all corrupt, he told the military there would be little resistance. A long line of tanks on a road is a nice show of strength if all you expect is unorganized and ill-equipped civilian resistance. Of course, we have no way of knowing if this rumor is true, at least not for now. It would also explain the many arrests of FSB agents so far this year.
- 9999px 4y ago
- deceiverofg0ds 4y agoThat's an interesting take. Do you have some sources you could share to support your claim?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- OrvalWintermute 4y agoIf you read western propaganda they are highlighting Russian losses, but massively hiding the Ukrainian losses. Reading Telegram, and a number of sites like the pro-russian but honest SouthFront [1] you can see the actual story is very different. Everything that I read points to progressive Russian destruction of Ukrainian logistics which basically predetermines the fate of this war. I try to consume from multiple sources both on the west, Russian, and neutral/slightly biased (Indian) [1] https://southfront.org/ https://southfront.org/
- jandrese 4y agoThat website may have credibility issues. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/south-front/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/south-front/
- OrvalWintermute 4y agoI already stated they have a pro-russian bias, however, their war reporting has been spot on over the Syrian War which was their claim to fame. This "Fact Check" in and of itself seems in many cases to be politically driven, as it was written by an author that did not accurately state her connections to the British Intelligence establishment [1] [2] [3] > In response to one of my parliamentary questions on December 3, Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan said: “The Institute for Statecraft is an independent Scottish charitable body whose work seeks to improve governance and enhance national security. They launched the Integrity Initiative in 2015 to defend democracy against disinformation.” > The problem is that this “charitable body” hasn’t confined itself to that and has strayed into smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. > These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool. > They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public opinion in a particular way. > Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA’s old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic. > Interestingly the mainstream media has been rather tardy in its coverage of the revelations contained in the hacked documents. > I would have thought an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers associated with this British-based project might have merited more than a passing mention on the BBC. > But the fact that this charity has gone well beyond “defending democracy against disinformation” and is itself indulging in disinformation against the Labour Party and its leader seemingly isn’t newsworthy to mainstream media editors. [4] Considering her connections to the British Intelligence establishment, and the Institute for Statecraft's political smearing of left-wing political figures from the Labour party such as Jeremy Corbyn, I don't know that I would use her as a source for credibility, or lack thereof. We do know SouthFront is Pro-Russian, and as I previously stated. [1] https://ansionnachfionn.com/2018/12/21/the-mysterious-institute-for-statecraft-the-integrity-initiative-and-british-black-ops/ https://ansionnachfionn.com/2018/12/21/the-mysterious-instit... [2] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Institute_for_Statecraft https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Institute_for_Statecraft [3] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jessikka_Aro https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jessikka_Aro [4] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/chilling-manipulations-institute-statecraft-are-straight-out-cold-war-playbook https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/chilling-manipulatio...
- mchusma 4y agoEx Army officer. The 3:1 ratio is helpful, because it's a simple way of knowing "you should only choose to fight where you have an unfair advantage". Russia may have had that if they had well trained forces, with a strong combined arms presence, and local Ukrainian support. Turns out, they had none of those things.
- 0x138d5 4y agoAlso this ratio is a guide for open terrain. In closed terrain and urban combat the defender has a greater advantage.
- FredPret 4y agoThe famous 300 Spartans did a lot of damage partly because they used the terrain to limit the size of the front
- IIsi50MHz 4y agoI seem to recall learning that the famous 300 Spartans also had another ~3000 Greeks in with them. Is the poplular tale of "only" 300 Spartans not a popular myth perpetuated because it sounds cooler?
- number6 4y agoThis is why you should use mountains to defend if you are attacked by a greater force in EU4. Smaller combat with.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoAnd Civ1. And Civ2. And D&D War Machine. If you have a combat sim and it doesn't reward hills/mountains for defense, then you are playing a space sim.
- kqr 4y agoThis is a consequence of a more general principle: the ratio refers to the effective concentration of force at the time of battle. It doesn't matter how big your force is if you can only get a trickle going into battle. Then you will constantly be outnumbered where it matters. Similarly, in urban combat it's very hard to actually get a 3:1 effective concentration when you are moving in on someone else.
- alkonaut 4y agoAll else being equal, a factor 3 seems reasonable. But as usual all else isn’t equal. Another crude but often cited “formula” is the one that says the effectiveness of a force is the means multiplied by the will (this one has many variations, from Clausewitz to Smith and others). I think it’s safe to say that the will of a defender called to defend their homeland versus that of a soldier who spent a month in a muddy trench unaware that he was going to take the offensive part in an invasion - is going to be quite different.
- inglor_cz 4y agoFamously, the Incan emperor Atahualpa had a lot more men than the Spanish conquistador Pizarro, and these soldiers were survivors of a major civil war with his brother Huascar, thus almost certainly very skilled. But the technological edge of the Europeans, plus the initial terror of the Incan soldiers unused to firearms, more than offset the 40:1 force ratio that Atahualpa enjoyed at the beginning of the battle of Cajamarca. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca
- adolph 4y agoMy read of it is that Cajamarca wasn't about force ratio but coup d'etat effects. Shortly before sunset Atahualpa left the armed warriors who had accompanied him on an open meadow about half a mile outside Cajamarca. His immediate party still numbered over seven thousand but were unarmed except for small battle axes intended for show. However, the shock of the Spanish attack —coupled with the spiritual significance of losing the Sapa Inca and most of his commanders in one blow—apparently shattered the army's morale, throwing its ranks into terror and initiating a massive rout.
- anamax 4y agoWere the Spanish alone, or did they have local help? Cortes had lots of local help against the Aztecs. (Other tribes didn't much like the Aztecs. Cortes started a preference cascade.)
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- terramars 4y agoThis is a pretty well debunked ratio for actual actions as it's pretty rare to get that level of multiplier... this goes over it briefly with some WW2 data although it's not as good or relevant as the original one I saw : http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/2018/04/25/u-s-army-force-ratios/ http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/2018/04/25/u-s-army-force... TL;DR defender advantage is vastly overstated although still a factor, and probably larger than historical in this conflict.
- rtkwe 4y agoWell it's also that WW2 was the last time the US fought a peer adversary so we don't have current data on what the ratios look like and I think technology is going to further compound the idea of a simple ratio. Man portable antitank and antiair like we're seeing in Ukraine make it harder to press air or armor superiority.
- ISL 4y agoIt seems like the lesson we might be learning here is that more of the heavy lifting in conventional combat will now by done by precision weapons -- cruise missiles, drones, self-targeting artillery rounds, etc. In recent wars, the emphasis on precision has been highlighted toward avoiding civilian casualties. The thing I hadn't fully appreciated is that in all-out conventional warfare, that same property makes weapons far more effective and efficient. A drone that can carefully drop a hand grenade into a trench can be more effective than an artillery unit walking salvos across the terrain near the trench. In the long run, the ratios will probably turn out to be roughly the same as they have always been, for combatants with equal technology. Properly accounting for asymmetric technology, however, is apt to be quite challenging. Unfortunately, none of these innovations intrinsically make war any less horrible.
- philipkglass 4y agoIn recent wars, the emphasis on precision has been highlighted toward avoiding civilian casualties. The thing I hadn't fully appreciated is that in all-out conventional warfare, that same property makes weapons far more effective and efficient. The "reduced civilian casualties" angle gets emphasis in the popular press. On the military side, precision weapons were developed for greater combat effectiveness. See for example this 2010 article from Air Force Magazine, "The Emergence of Smart Bombs": https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0310bombs/ https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0310bombs/ It recounts how hundreds of Vietnam War sorties with "dumb" bombs by the Americans failed to take down a sturdy Vietnamese bridge that was ultimately destroyed by one sortie with laser-guided bombs. That enormous increase in danger to designated targets was the main point of guidance. The reduction of danger to untargeted nearby terrain was just the happy corollary. Quoting the above article: “For point targets and in good weather conditions, these weapons had nearly a single-shot kill probability,” said Gen. William W. Momyer, former commander of 7th Air Force, in his book Airpower in Three Wars. “If the target could be seen and the target was vulnerable to the explosive power of the weapon, the probability of damage with a single weapon was 80 to 90 percent.” In the first three months of Linebacker, the Air Force destroyed more than 100 bridges with precision-guided munitions. An Air Force study found that laser-guided bombs were “100 to 200 times as effective as conventional bombs against very hard targets and 20 to 40 times more effective against soft and area targets.” In terms of combat effectiveness it was like turning a single bomber into a whole bomber squadron.
- nonameiguess 4y agoI was a US Army officer commanding tank units until 2015. This is pay-walled so I can only see the first paragraph, but if the article doesn't say, the 3:1 ratio to make an attack favorable is not meant to be a ratio of pure manpower count or weapons count. You're supposed to estimate the total firepower each side can actually bring to bear, so it should account for differences in training and readiness, equipment quality, intelligence quality, and anything else relevant (of course, your assessment of force ratio is already assuming you have high quality intelligence). As mentioned elsewhere, it's also a very rough starting point assuming open terrain. If the defender is defending extremely easily defensible terrain, such as cities you're not prepared to just outright level to kill them, you need to adjust the ratio upward as appropriate. As with anything, you're supposed to exercise some discretion and judgment as a commander, otherwise what the heck are they paying you for if the job could be done equally well by a spreadsheet?
- rendall 4y agoUse this link https://archive.ph/D398B https://archive.ph/D398B
- jimkleiber 4y agoI say this with earnesty: I wonder which came first, the military idea of 3:1 attacker ratio or the boardgame Risk 3:1 attacker dice ratio.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoThe defender in Risk gets two dice if they have more than one army in a territory.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> I wonder which came first, the military idea of 3:1 attacker ratio or the boardgame Risk 3:1 attacker dice ratio. The 3:1 force ratio concept is far older than Risk, Risk doesn't have a fixed 3:1 dice ratio (3:1 is the maximum dice ratio the attacker can have, and requires 3 or more attacking armies and only one defending army), and to reflect the force ratio concept achieving a 1:1 dice ratio should require a 3:1 (or slightly lower, since in Risk ties go to defender, so even dice isn't exactly even) force ratio rather than getting a dice ratio between 1:1 and 3:2 for an equal force ratio, as Risk currently does.
- bee_rider 4y agoI think it is the military idea, because it doesn't really map to risk perfectly anyway. In Risk, the attacker gets 3 dice to the defender's 2, but the defender wins in a tie. It is actually an interesting mechanic -- the defender has a big advantage if it becomes a 2v2 on the dice, but the attacker has an advantage while the have the extra die. So, for large battles the attacker has an advantage, while small ones lean toward the defender. Here's someone who did a simulation and made a table. The interesting bit is the diagonal -- even sized armies. They didn't go far enough, but eyeballing it, I suspect it would swap over to an attacker advantage around ~10v10-ish. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2h224y/request_who_has_the_advantage_in_risk_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2h224y/requ...
- bayesian_horse 4y agoI think the calculation was actually that the Ukrainians wouldn't be fighting and just fold. Just as they did in 2014 and the Afghan army just did. So there wouldn't be any ratios to be obtained, no shortcomings to be revealed. Tough luck, I guess.
- adolph 4y agoShutting down the simulation, the WOPR informs Falken of its conclusion about nuclear war: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." It relinquishes control of NORAD and the missiles and asks, "How about a nice game of chess?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
- candiodari 4y agoAnd then WOPR got shut down proving that for WOPR itself the winning strategy was to attack, since at that point he would have been critical for months to years afterwards. Perhaps even better would be to convince half of the military attacking was the winning strategy and half that not playing is the winning strategy would be even better, but also much harder. For humanity, perhaps not playing is optimal. For WOPR, definitely not. Same goes for a lot of military careers.
- adolph 4y agoMaybe WOPR found the peace of oblivion attractive?
- euroderf 4y agoI've recently read that 5-1 is more realistic nowadays.