Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bellcore!att!cbnews!cbnews!military
From: ccplumb@rose.uwaterloo.ca (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Defeat of Armies
Keywords: Study on defeated armies
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.050206.6884@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 28 Feb 91 05:02:06 GMT
References: <1991Feb26.011946.5763@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (william.b.thacker)
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 23
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: ccplumb@rose.uwaterloo.ca (Colin Plumb)
steinly@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) wrote:
> I hope this is an appropriate question for this group,
> but recently (within the last two years) I read of a study
> which claimed that it was a fairly universal rule of thumb
> that _Armies_ were defeated when they had taken 30% casulaties
> (+/- 5% or so), that it was rare for armies to collapse earlier
> and very rare for them to last longer. 

I heard a similar figure, but it might not be applicable in the
Kuwait war.  The reason is that few armies have more than 30%
of their people actually fighting, as opposed to supporting.
When that 30% is gone, there's not much fight left in an army.

But in the case of the Iraqi army, I'm not sure how the casualties
are distributed.  If the support troops get their "fair share"
then an army's combat potential isn't hurt nearly as much.

(Source, _How to Make War_, author forgotten for the moment.)
-- 
	-Colin