Lanchester’s Square Law
I’d not been previously aware of “Lanchester’s Square Law” prior to this article at abcnews.com: Assessing Military Edge. In an interesting application of math to war, it states that for two matched armies on a battlefield, doubling the size of one will kill the enemy four times faster. Or conversely, hitting four times better is the only way keep even odds while being outnumbered 2-to-1.
First proposed by F. W. Lanchester in his 1916 book “Aircraft in Warfare”, these tactics have been taught in the military ever since.
This has interesting implications if US soldiers end up on foot in the streets of Baghdad without the ability to use precision guided bombs or tanks.
