Eli5 why are combat units “ineffective” after taking 15% losses?
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I’m not an expert on the matter but I’d imagine it would be similar to your body.
Your body is effective as long as every system works normally. If I take 15% of your body either in one big chunk or bits here and there it’s going to knock you out and take you out of action. You are out of commission.
its 2 issues actually:
1: most combat units are staffed both by combatants and support staff. unit losses are generally in the combat staff side. ie: if a battalion is 50/50 combat/support. a loss of 15% efficiency means you likely took about 30% loss of your combat forces.(and sht really hits the fan if this loss is in the support staff meaning you know have unsupported troops out there that may no longer have stable supply or intel lines)
2: Heavy casualties have a major impact on unit morale which in turn if this unit is forced to keep fighting might lead to these losses cascading into more losses.
We were always taught between 30% and 60%, depending on who you ask. That being said, as others have mentioned, it depends on what 15% you’re talking about. 15% of C3I could possibly have a greater impact than say, 15% of your armored vehicles.
During Desert Storm, our goal was 50% for Republican Guard units and less for others. It is one of the reasons the air campaign took longer than expected, so we could have adequate time to reduce the effectiveness of their premier units. The rapid ground offensive was a testament to the soundness of that strategy.
The big thing with combat units is morale… first there’s obviously a workload issue, but second, below that number, someone dying is an accident or an anamoly. If your unit suffers more than 15 percent though, the odds are good enough that you start having to assess the real risk that you might die.
If there’s a 1 in 100 chance that in storming a beach that you’re going to die fighting for your country, that gives you a 99 percent chance of surviving as a hero. If it’s 1 in 15, now there’s about a 1 in 7 chance you die, and even if you remain brave, it only takes a few defectors or guys on your side switching to self preservation mode to make your unit ineffective, which quickly causes a contagion effect on your unit… once you start getting waves of defections everyone who stays doesn’t feel very brave anymore.
This is a really big rule of thumb that you need to take with a big, BIG, grain of salt.
Let’s first understand that a military unit can do one of three things: advance, hold, and retreat.
For retreating units there is no upper limit on casualties they can take and keep retreating. Question is how disorganized the retreat is going to be. You want men coming back with their equipment and in a position to be given a rest, a hot meal, and sent back out then you better not have 50% casualties.
For holding units the question becomes when will they retreat against orders, or surrender. You make it easy for people to surrender and not think they are going to get killed, and just imagine yourself in that situation, what chance of death do you think you’d need to convince you that whatever this cause is, it isn’t worth that risk? So things like cut off food, cut off fuel, incompetent leadership can all matter just as much, if not more, than how many people are actually dead or wounded.
But the real issue is those advancing units. Imagine you’re part of a tank division, say 500 tanks in your group, and a ton of support people being fuel tankers, food trucks, etc.
So, lets go take that town. We swoop in, pow, pow, pow, win the battle and holy christ! 5 of our tanks got smoked in the fight. We didn’t kill any Ukrainian tanks, how the hell did that even happen? And the people in those tanks… you can smell the cooking flesh. Poor bastards never even had a chance and their tanks BLEW UP. This isn’t a little hole kind of thing – or if it is how the hell did that kill everyone in them. But the tanks, instead of being armoured protection, are like BOMBS that we’re fighting inside of. The fuel went up, the ammunition went off, shit man.
Well, ok, that was pretty shocking… but that’s war right, we trained for this. We do another town, this time we’re trying to be a bit more careful, and 10 tanks bought it! And now its haunting, one of the tanks, the guy who has my job, he was half out, trying to crawl away as he burned to death. I mean… that seriously could have been me.
They want us to take another town. Let’s sit the hell down first and figure this out. I am not getting burned to fucking death on account of this crap. So what did we do wrong that we were losing tanks? Well it turns out our infantry wasn’t doing their jobs and going in ahead of us to take out the anti-tank soldiers hiding in the villages. Well shit man, why the hell are we doing our job if they aren’t doing there’s?
Command tells us the infantry got a VERY stern talking to, next town’s going to be better. AND SON OF A XXXXXXX we lost 20 tanks! THOSE WORTHLESS MOTHERLESS XXXXXXXXXX!
So, at some point, pretty quickly, command says you go take another town and you say “unfortunately I’m fresh out of bullets, gasoline, and my tank needs fresh treads and guess what, it doesn’t matter how many bullets, gasoline, or treads you send me because my real issue is that I’m not going in there until the infantry does its job – but I can’t tell you that.
And then, at some point after that, when ever more of my buddies got killed, I’m just done with this whole war thing. Thanks, but not as fun as it seemed in the recruiting videos. I think I’d like to go home and spend the next decade waking up screaming every day. If its all the same to everyone.
If I cut off your foot, you’re only missing a small part of your body, but your function as a walking talking breathing thinking human being is greatly impaired.
Theodore Ayrault Dodge did an analysis on battle casualty percentages from antiquity through the Civil War and he found that for most battles (that didn’t end in one-sided routs, or outliers. He also died before WW1.) the forces suffered between 10-15% losses on average, regardless of era or types of weapon used. I’m not really sure the takeaway from that, but it was really interesting.
It takes two people to take care of a casualty. Your 15% losses require another 30% to treat them. You’re now down 45% of your force and losing any additional forces will require even more to take care of them bringing you to under 50%.
Think of a combat unit like an IKEA table – how many parts would you have to lose before you could no longer build a functioning table? The table designers have to balance the cost of the table with the redundancy of individual parts. It doesn’t matter how many extra bolts you have if your table leg gets broken in shipping – you have to take it back and get a new one to have a fully functioning table! (Alternatively, you can duct tape it together… but it won’t ever work as well!)
Losses don’t always mean killed soldiers.
If they are incapacitated, you will need to move them out or set up a strong position to take care of them.
That means that your 15% just grew to 30% of non-combatants.
This is a severe blow to the firepower your unit has, and then it is better to dig-in and wait for reinforcement or get out of the danger zone.
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