Schwartz E.L. Attrition Processes with Parking Areas

Institute for defense analyses. — Alexandria, Virginia, 1988. — 47 p.This paper examines a class of combat processes in which targets can be located on parking areas, so that an attack on a target can kill other targets on the same parking area. These processes have characteristics of both point fire and area fire models. A certain probabilistic model of an attack process is postulated; from it, exact and approximate expressions for expected numbers of targets killed are derived for a number of different sets of variations in the assumptions underlying the model. The paper explores in detail the relationship between these expressions and several previously-developed attrition equations in which targets were assumed not to be located on parking areas. The paper also provides rigorous mathematical justification for three equations that have been used in several combat simulations to compute attrition to aircraft on the ground. These equations are shown to be different special cases of the general model.