Measuring and visualizing combat effectiveness

Abstract

Combat effectiveness created by deployment of force is a key factor in leading successful combat operations. Measurements of combat effectiveness should consider the overall capabilities of the resources involved, and should capture spatial aspects to keep regional advantages for a combat operation. This study focuses on developing an analytical metric to measure combat effectiveness by adapting network representation of a combat environment, and visualizes it in a map format. Attack opportunity structures and their numerical values are computed for each unit area in a battlefield, which represents the force's possibility of creating attack opportunities in that location. In this study, we consider a defense operation where the force's initial deployment strategy plays a critical role in how the combat proceeds. Applying the proposed metric to a simulation of a defense scenario, we find that the spatial distribution of combat effectiveness is highly correlated with the combat results.