The Attrition Dynamics of Multilateral War

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kress, Moshe; Lin, Kyle Y.; MacKay, Niall J.
• 署名单位: United States Department of Defense; United States Navy; Naval Postgraduate School; University of York - UK
• 刊物名称: OPERATIONS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0030-364X
• DOI: 10.1287/opre.2018.1718
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 950-956
• 关键词: combat; MODEL; game

摘要

We extend classical force-on-force combat models to study the attrition dynamics of three-way and multilateral war. We introduce a new multilateral combat model-the multiduel-which generalizes the Lanchester models, and we solve it under an objective function that values one's own surviving force minus that of one's enemies. The outcome is stark: either one side is strong enough to destroy all the others combined, or all sides are locked in a stalemate, which results in collective mutual annihilation. The situation in Syria fits this paradigm.