Lanchester and the Cold War

During the Cold War, in the strategic nuclear area, the United States wisely opted for parity in numbers and, generally, some superiority in weapons capability. However, in the tactical arena, the United States took a different approach. The Warsaw Pact nations had overwhelming numerical superiority in almost all categories of conventional forces—infantry, tanks, artillery, tactical aircraft, and so on—ranging from 2:1 to 5:1. NATO based its counter to such numbers on a substantial conventional force plus tactical nuclear weapons. The plan called for 15 000 nuclear weapons: artillery shells, warheads for surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles (SSMs and SAMs), and nuclear bombs for tactical aircraft. Although most of the weapons were fabricated—deployment to Europe was limited to about 7000—the threat of their use effectively countered any Warsaw Pact offensive capability for more than two decades.

However, over time, similar advances by the Soviets overtook that "solution," and there were concerns about crossing the nuclear threshold and triggering strategic exchanges. Therefore, NATO began considering a conventional solution to the numerical disparity.

In the mid-1970s, as the United States started to rebound from the Vietnam War, key analyses by BDM International (a defense consulting and research firm) and Martin Marietta prompted the U.S. Department of Defense to readdress the conventional-force imbalance. One effort was a Defense Science Board (DSB) study in 1976 titled "Conventional Counters to a Pact Attack." The charge was to see what technology could do to help counter the numerical discrepancy.

Early in the study, one of the board members, MITRE's Ed Key, pointed out the relevance of Lanchester's Law, and it became a major theme of the study. The first conclusion of the DSB study noted the importance of a surveillance system that could provide NATO forces an accurate and timely picture of enemy force distribution with an appropriate command, control, and communications (C3) structure, which together would allow commanders to achieve, in some cases, local numerical superiority and, in others, to avoid local numerical inferiority.

A second thrust was to seek systems for asymmetrical engagements whose effectiveness would be sufficiently great to overcome numerical square-law advantages. Because, for example, it would be nearly impossible to make NATO tanks nine times as good as Warsaw Pact tanks to overcome the 3:1 numerical advantage, other means of effectively attacking tanks, whereby the tank had essentially zero capability against the attacker, were sought. Several promising approaches were identified and many more were conceived by the Defense Department and vigorously pursued.

The thrust of asymmetrical engagements is to avoid force against a numerically superior similar force until the enemy force has been substantially weakened. The combination of those capabilities led to the term "force multiplier," which rapidly became a buzzword in the military community.

The third finding of the DSB study was: if good surveillance and C3 were good for NATO, then countering or disrupting Warsaw Pact surveillance and C3 would be bad for the enemy. The Defense Department launched a substantial C3 countermeasures (C3CM) effort, and the term "force divider" was born. C3CM is yet another form of asymmetric engagement.

By the late 1970s, Defense Department speeches were awash with Lanchester. To rephrase an old maxim: You couldn't throw an empty beer bottle through a window without hitting some major giving a talk on Lanchester's equations.