Talk:Dispersal (military)

Accuracy of information

This is regarding JHFTC's edit [1], which said "No way was that a precise figure", commenting about the statistic that a dispersed force could double the number of artillery rounds needed to destroy it. You can find my reference for that on the table at the bottom of page 120 of the fourth edition of How To Make War. As I know it's very annoying to have to go and buy/borrow a book, I'll provide the relevant info in a snippet here.

Regarding what a dispersed defense is, he says "Dispersed defense is similar to prepared defense, except that the troops are spread over a wider area" and, he says "Prepared defense is when troops have time to dig in and prepare to defend." Looking at the table, a dispersed defense requires at least twice as many tons of ammunition as all the other defenses provided (those are: hasty defense, prepared defense, and dispersed defense). This is likely due to the fact that the dispersed defense he refers to uses twice as much land area as the other two (he provides 7 sq km for a dispersed defense, 3.6 for the other two). He appears to use the words "division" and "unit" in the surrounding text interchangeably, but I believe he is referring to divisions on the table, or "units" of equivalent size in non-US militaries. Either way, it does make sense. If you double the area your forces are taking up, all things being equal, it will take twice as many artillery rounds to inflict the same damage to all of them, unless you were initially causing overkill (which means using too many artillery rounds). -NorsemanII 06:04, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Since the power of an explosion varies with the square of the distance, I'm not sure Mr. Dunnigan's assumption that the calculation is linear is accurate...-Toptomcat 15:29, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

We're talking about using more artillery rounds, not bigger ones, so, unless we're using a nuclear artillery round that can cover 7 sq. km, that doesn't matter. Each artillery round will have a certain area that it destroys, and an area that it will damage but not destroy. When you add another artillery round, you get a finite increase in the area you are covering. If you need 500 artillery rounds to destroy everything in 3.6 sq km, then you need another 500 to destroy another 3.6 sq km. -NorsemanII 21:35, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but even accounting for that, the phrase "as much as double" is misleading. By this rule, spreading them out over three times as much space would require three times as many artillery rounds, violating the maximum that phrase implies. -Toptomcat 22:43, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

True, I'll fix that. -NorsemanII 22:53, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Also, isn't this viable on the squad level in situations other than counter-insurgency, i.e. against any enemy with grenades? -Toptomcat 00:45, 25 November 2006 (UTC)