A bottleneck combat model: an application to the Battle of Thermopylae

Anelí Bongers and Jose Torres ()

Operational Research, 2021, vol. 21, issue 4, No 23, 2859-2877

Abstract: Abstract This paper proposes a Lanchester-type combat model to simulate battles in which one or two of the opposing sides cannot use all the forces simultaneously due to some physical restriction (i.e., topographic constraints, transforming the battlefield into a bottleneck). We show that this model, when the bottleneck restriction applies to both sides, leads to the Lanchester’s linear law for both aimed- and unaimed-fire, but the rate of change over time is a constant. The main characteristics of the bottleneck combat model are the following: (1) the topographic constraint makes the quality (fighting effectiveness) and size of the restriction the more relevant factors for the outcome of the battle, reducing the relative importance of quantity; (2) the bottleneck transforms the Lanchester’s square law into the linear law under direct-fire; and (3) if quality is similar among foes, the topographic bottleneck restriction is irrelevant for victory. The model is used to simulate the Battle of Thermopylae and shows that if the bottleneck restriction had persisted and was not removed, the Persian army would have been defeated.

Keywords: Dynamical system; Lanchester’s combat model; Topographic constraint; Bottleneck; Battle of Thermopylae; 90-08; 97M10; 97M99 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12351-019-00513-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:operea:v:21:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s12351-019-00513-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... search/journal/12351

DOI: 10.1007/s12351-019-00513-0

Access Statistics for this article

Operational Research is currently edited by Nikolaos F. Matsatsinis, John Psarras and Constantin Zopounidis

More articles in Operational Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().