APPLICATION OF LANCHESTER COMBAT MODEL IN THE ARDENNES CAMPAIGN

Abstract

Since the appearance of F.W. Lanchester's pioneering development of combat models (Lanchester [1916]) during the first World War, his work has been extensively modified to represent a variety of competitions, ranging from isolated battles to entire wars. A great deal of attention has been devoted to applying such models to actual battle situations (Engel [1954], Hueter [1978], Bracken [1995]). The consideration is to focus on the validity of various Lanchesterian models, i.e., to show that there exist models which do indeed fit the data of actual confrontations (Coleman [1983]). The objective of the present paper is to use the “classical” Lanchester combat model for two reinforced armies having homogeneous, linear nonbattle loss rates, with specific application to the Ardennes campaign of World War II (December 15, 1944–January 16, 1945). We observe that the fit is remarkably good. Moreover, using data from the early phases of the encounter, we also found that there is certain agreement between the predicted and actual force strengths of the latter stages of the battle.