Eli5 why are combat units “ineffective” after taking 15% losses?
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“Ineffective” here doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t do shit on the battlefield. Rather, it means that it probably can’t accomplish goals or missions that a full-strength unit could be expected to handle.
The purpose of a combat unit isn’t actually to engage in combat, that’s a means to an end. They’re given objectives that fit into a strategic objective. So things like “protect this convey,” or “defend this stretch of land,” or “neutralize that enemy unit of artillery.”
Many of these goals are quantitative, to an extent. Say you have a front line that extends for ten miles that you need to secure. You’ll assign different units to different pieces of that line. And a military planner has to be able to know what’s a “reasonable” length of front-line that can be held by a combat unit of a particular size.
So now in this sense, if a combat unit takes 15% losses then it can’t hold its stretch of front-line. It probably *could* hold a stretch of front-line that’s 15% smaller. It’s not like they’re totally useless. But if you assign them the goal of a full-strength unit, they’re going to be stretched too thin and not able to keep up.
Obviously combat effectiveness doesn’t stay flat at 14.9% casualties and then fall off a cliff at 15.00%. These are more like, rules of thumb for military planners. But they’re important ones, because they allow planners to manage resources *at scale*, and achieve reasonable effectiveness despite imperfect information.
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