Reader response: weapon lethality and battlefield risk
Following on from my post on the increasing lethality of weapon systems over time, I got some interesting correspondence from Strategist reader David Goyne. He provided me with some data taken from the work of the late T.N. Dupuy, who David accurately describes as ‘a US Army officer, historian, operational analysis autodidact, and a fanatical advocate for his OA (operational analysis) method based on quantified historical data and assessment’.
Relevant to the earlier post is Dupuy’s observation of a counter-intuitive trend—the increased lethality of weapon systems has been accompanied by a decline in the average daily casualty rates in major battles (see the graph below, source: redrawn from data in T.N. Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare).
