It has long been established that terrain significantly influences the way armed forces conduct combat. In order to best plan future U.S. force structure and weapon system acquisition, military planners must understand fully the influence of the environments in which those forces and weapon systems will operate. The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) performed this study to expand the body of knowledge regarding the effects of terrain upon modern tactical mechanized combat. The study had two goals. The first was to quantify effects known qualitatively by military planners and to observe heretofore unidentified differences between combat taking place in different types of terrain. The second was to derive tactical combat coefficients for the Variable Force eMployment (VFM) theater-level combat model developed at IDA. The Janus combat simulation was used to perform controlled experiments which they simulated 850 battalion-level engagements over digitized maps of real terrain in Central Europe, Southwest Asia, and Korea. Janus is an interactive, brigade-level, two-sided, stochastic computer combat simulation. It models fighting systems (e.g., tanks, helicopters, howitzers, and infantrymen) as individual entities.


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    Title :

    Study of the Effects of Terrain on Mechanized Combat Using the Janus System


    Contributors:
    E. S. Barnett (author) / D. Gray (author)

    Publication date :

    1991


    Size :

    179 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English