Defeating a numerically superior enemy.

Miniscule spoilers

I was musing yesterday about how a force would undertake to defeat a numerically superior enemy, and my memory turned to a book I read many, ahem, weeks ago. The title of the book was How to Make War, and the author was James F. Dunnigan. Mr. Dunnigan mentioned a rule of thumb regarding how many forces it takes to defeat how many. If I remember correctly there were a number of rules-of-three. Basically, a certain quality in a force can multiply the effective number of a force by up to three times, or as few as one time. Let me give you an example. One of the qualities was training. Suppose one force was well trained, recently trained, and was trained on the relevant weapons and best tactics. An officer might assign that force a 3. If the enemy force were poorly trained long ago on the wrong weapons, an officer might assign that force a 1. All else being equal, one should expect a well trained force of 1110 people to easily defeat any force of poorly trained people up to 3330, since 1110 times 3 is 3330.

There were several qualities other than training. I definitely remember morale, or how eager the force was to fight. I also remember equipment being one quality. Dunnigan wrote that officers had expressed the opinion that a well-trained, eager force with inferior weapons could easily defeat a poorly-trained, discouraged enemy with superior weapons, because the former force had a multiplier of 3 times 3 times 1, or 9, while the latter had 1 times 1 times 3, or three.

There is a place in the Safehold series where both forces are eager to fight. In those situations both forces should be assigned a multiplier of 3. Later one force becomes discouraged. The discouraged force should be assigned a multiplier of 1.

I wonder...have any of you read the book, or books on similar topics? What other qualities might a force possess that might give them a multiplier? What might the Army of the Sylmahn's total multiplier be? The Army of Glacierheart?

~Tonto

This harks back to the old Soviet battle calculus.

From the 1994 edition of FM 34-130, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield
Figure B-52.
Force Ratio......................Typical Mission
(friendly:enemy)
....1:6..........................Delay
....1:3..........................Defend (prepared)
....1:2.5........................Defend (hasty)
....2.5:1........................Attack (Hasty position)
....3:1..........................Attack (prepared position)
....1:1..........................Counterattack (flank)

(Sorry about the format but I can't get the columns to come out right.)

Also from the 1994 edition of FM 34-130, Figure B-53.

The simplest method of calculating force ratios is a straight comparison of the number of units on each side. For example, 27 threat battalions opposed by 9 friendly battalions give a force ratio of 3:1. Using this technique, count brigades and regiments as roughly equivalent, and simply total the number available to each force.

But not all units are equal. For example, US tank battalions have a little over 50 tanks while some Soviet style tank battalions have only about 30. To acocunt for this size difference, covert the actual number of units into "US Equivalents."

We begin by dividing the number of tanks in the Soviet style battalion by the number of tanks in the US battalion. This gives us a value of 0.6 as the US equivalent size of one Soviet style tank battalion (30/50=0.6). We then multiply the total number of such battalions by this value to get a total of US equivalent strength of 16 battalions (27X0.6=16.2). Our force ratio is now 16 enemy battalion equivalents opposed by 9 friendly battalions, or 1.8:1.

We can further refine this force ratios by accounting for the difference in combat capability of the type of equipment in each unit. For example, we may decide that an M1 tank has twice the combat power of a T-55 tank. Assuming that the tank battalions in our example are equipped with M1s and T-55s, respectively, this gives us a multiplier of 2 for the friendly battalions and 1 for the threat battalions. This now gives us battalion equivalents of 16 threat and 18 friendly battalions, changing our force ratio to about 1:1.1.

Assigning these values requires careful judgment of the relative capabilities of the equipment involved. Be careful to avoid letting wishful thinking cloud your judgment. You should also resist the temptation to attempt to account for other, less tangible factors such as leadership and flexibility.

From the newest book, we guess that most of the army of god and allies in the field are dealt with or soon to be. It is expected that soon the republic will secure their borders and then march on.
It is likely they would simply secure the border to silkiah for now, or possibly even expand to include it, but stop at the bridge to howard. They can use that land bridge as a choke point to hold back any forces from the south.
Dohlar sent most of its army on attack, and lost most of it, so they are in a vulnerable poition, so the border should be easy to take and secure, depending on what resources they have left, will determine the next step, but dealing with dohlar would help repay the debt they owe charis.
The republic is sure to go after the border states and the temple lands, the thing is, the eaiest route would be the canal system, but the central church outpost is lake city, and it is well supplied and potentially filled with people and soldiers. The sheer size of the force waiting at the cnals could be enoght to hold the republic in check for a time

USMA74 wrote:This harks back to the old Soviet battle calculus.

From the 1994 edition of FM 34-130, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield
Figure B-52.
Force Ratio......................Typical Mission
(friendly:enemy)
....1:6..........................Delay
....1:3..........................Defend (prepared)
....1:2.5........................Defend (hasty)
....2.5:1........................Attack (Hasty position)
....3:1..........................Attack (prepared position)
....1:1..........................Counterattack (flank)

...

Be careful to avoid letting wishful thinking cloud your judgment. You should also resist the temptation to attempt to account for other, less tangible factors such as leadership and flexibility.

Question: We have seen the great force multipliers of higher technology and behind-the-lines strikes at logistics to prevent the advance of and even to defeat a numerically superior attacking enemy. But I don't see how that is going to help so much in an offensive against core Church territories.

Since you appear to have some knowledge of land war, any historical examples? The England analogy only goes so far as England didn't actually hold territory against the primal opposition of the populace generally. It inserted itself into critical political and economic positions. So it did not really conquer in the sense the EoC will have to.

The EoC really does have to conquer the Church-held territories in the Roman sense of the term. That is take over the culture of the territories and insert their own. This was a generational process they worked out very good principles for, but makes for a VERY long series of books!

Hmm, conquest is easy changing a culture is difficult. From hints in interviews RFC sees a second war when the truth about the history of Safehold comes out, a second religious war. There may be a third as a true republican form of government replaces the royal power. Pushing this will cause difficulties of it's own. It will be interesting to see how RFC handles it.

Back to the main thread question the answers are force multipliers, IE better weapons technology and tactics, second is the fact that one side owns the seas thus has better power projection and supply lines. The introduction of mechanical transport on sea and land is likely, with perhaps air, will add even better power projection.

Poker

Unlike the English in Africa/Asia, the Romans essentially inserted themselves into conquered territories by settling vets into the area as landowners, magistrates, police, etc. They also extended citizenship liberally as people in those settled areas adopted Roman institutions, intermarried, etc. over time. The vets were able to deal with problems (brutally at times) at a very local level--a strategy preventing general uprisings in the main. They were taken into the empire fully with representation even in the Senate after becoming fully "Romanized". But this process was decadal, not short to medium term at all.

We are well into the process of "Charisizing" Chisholm and even Corisande is on the road that way. Charisizing Desnair/Silkiah is imaginable. Charisizing Harchong and the core church lands really is not in the cards to my mind over any reasonable term of time.

pokermind wrote:Hmm, conquest is easy changing a culture is difficult. From hints in interviews RFC sees a second war when the truth about the history of Safehold comes out, a second religious war. There may be a third as a true republican form of government replaces the royal power. Pushing this will cause difficulties of it's own. It will be interesting to see how RFC handles it.

Back to the main thread question the answers are force multipliers, IE better weapons technology and tactics, second is the fact that one side owns the seas thus has better power projection and supply lines. The introduction of mechanical transport on sea and land is likely, with perhaps air, will add even better power projection.

Poker

I think a second war is nigh unavoidable. The truth about the CoGA can't be brought out at this point - it would throw a mass of spanners into the alliance at a critical stage.
It is such an explosive revelation that it is likely to lead to conflict. Hopefully the Inner Circle will have enough leverage and political capital around the Empire and beyond to make sure any new conflict starts on more favourable terms than the current one did!

One concern, especially if peace lasts a little while, is this:
If the OBS is not destroyed or brought under control, there is a KNOWN UPPER BOUND on how advanced Charis can become. This raises the worrying possibility I'm surprised nobody in the Inner Circle has voiced (unless they have and I forgot it!) of Charis reaching that upper bound and then seeing her enemies catch up, unable to keep advancing, because the OBS is still up there!
I would expect Charis to retain some advantages; they have OWL's databases, the SNARCs etc - but they'd lose out on the riproaring technical progress that's served them so well so far.
I'm certain RFC has a way of dealing with the OBS tucked up his sleeve, but the characters don't know that!

“One man with a gun can control 100 without one. ... Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.”

― Vladimir Lenin

The Communist Party (single digit percents) and its supporting elements (double digit percents) were a very substantial percentage of the population of the USSR. EoC is going to have a very hard time putting that level of infrastructure into the Harchong and Howard areas especially when they can expect minimal to zero help at first from the local population. Of course they could depopulate whole areas which the Bolsheviks did as well.

And those "searches" to which you refer were actually a civil war with million of casualties on both sides and many millions more casualties among those who were just caught in the middle. I'm not entirely sure the EoC can support this level of offense as the aggressor.

Captain Igloo wrote:“One man with a gun can control 100 without one. ... Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.”

― Vladimir Lenin

Re. The "Roman" model I mentioned above. I never heard him state so, but I'm sure he would agree: Pournelle copied many of his Empire of Man settlement techniques from the Roman model. Most explicitly in King David's Spaceship but also elsewhere.