Understanding War: History and a Theory of Combat

Dupuy describes his book as an attempt to devise a theory and model of combat which would in essence complete Clausewitz's work in this area. Dupuy's Quantified Judgement Model ("QJM") is essentially a reformulation and extension of Clausewitz's observations on the interplay between the quantity of troops, the quality of troops, and other relevant factors. This book features the calculation of many (rather simple) ratios as Dupuy seeks to illustrate the workings and validity of the QJM. More interesting, as least to me, is Dupuy's well done analysis of issues such as Diminishing Returns in Combat, Advance Rates in Combat, Attrition in Combat, Friction in Combat (each of these is a chapter in the book) and other similar topics. Ultimately, I found Dupuy's treatment of the QJM interesting, but I am dubious that the model will prove very useful to anyone (except perhaps wargame developers) because while the model correctly identifies the various factors to be quantified, I don't think that, despite Dupuy's attempts, many of these factors can be quantified with any degree of precision. The real value of this book, in my opinion, are the various discrete conclusions that Dupuy discusses in the book based on his extensive and perhaps unique "quant" analysis of historical campaigns. For instance, after analyzing numerous campaigns from Napoleon to the Arab-Israeli Wars, he concludes that the rate of advance of armies have not increased at all from Napoleon's time to our own, despite the advent of mechanization, etc.! If this is the kind of thing that interests you, this is the book for you. I gave this book four stars rather than five because the book can be rather dry, and as I said, I ultimately didn't really buy into the usefulness of the QJM as a model of combat.