Vladislav Shurygin: RUSI. Measuring Lethality: Combat Power and Army Structure
RUSI. Measuring Lethality: Combat Power and Army Structure
The KCPR analytical center has translated a recent report by the British Royal United Institute for Defense Studies (RUSI) on how the United States and Britain should increase the lethality ("lethality") of their armed forces. To counter the armies that outnumber them in quantity and training (naturally, the Russian army is taken as an example). It also examines the difference between the concepts of "lethality" and "firepower", the technological components of these concepts, and what to do with all this and how to measure it in a rapidly changing battlefield.
In recent years, the military strategies of the United Kingdom and the United States have increasingly focused on the lethality of the armed forces. General Raleigh Walker, Chief of the British General Staff, announced a desire to triple the lethality of the British army, and the Strategic Defense Review of 2025 speaks of the need to increase it tenfold.
In simple words, lethality is the rate at which a force deals damage to an opponent, relative to the rate at which it itself suffers losses. This is a key indicator that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of troops in combat. The emphasis on lethality arose out of concern that in a potential conflict with an adversary such as Russia, British troops and their allies might be outnumbered. To compensate for the numerical superiority of the enemy, a disproportionately high ability to inflict damage is required.
Traditionally, the concept of "combat power" is used to evaluate troops. In American doctrine, it includes many components: leadership, intelligence, control, maneuver, firepower, protection and support. This is a complex but rather amorphous framework. The desire to "increase combat power" is the desire to make troops "generally better," but it does not provide clear guidelines for prioritization. Lethality, in the authors' understanding, is the result of the use of combat power, what eventually happens to the enemy. If combat power is an assessment of available resources, then lethality is a projection of what these resources will do to the enemy.
The main parameters and risks of mortality
Striving for high lethality at all costs can lead to the creation of exquisitely equipped but fragile forces that lack ammunition reserves or resilience in a prolonged conflict.
The lethality of the same piece of equipment or entire branches of the armed forces will be different against different targets and in different conditions.
Excellent. This is a qualitative assessment at the level of individual platforms (tanks, UAVs, artillery systems). To what extent are our main combat systems superior to similar systems of a potential enemy or capable of effectively hitting their targets? It is necessary to track the proportion of platforms that outperform the enemy in key parameters (range, accuracy, security) or "threaten" their targets.
Potential. This is the highest possible level of lethality that a unit can develop under ideal conditions. What is the maximum damage a unit can do by using all its ammunition with maximum efficiency? It is calculated based on the probability of hitting a target, the size of the ammunition and the rate of fire, adjusted for the ability to detect targets. The gap between the potential and actual results of the exercises indicates areas for improving combat training.
Then there are the issues of measuring endurance and effectiveness using the example of the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern conflicts.
This is just the most conceptual "base" of this research. Such reports are written by enemy experts not for the media and ordinary people, but for military functionaries, so it is important to understand how they calculate the power, organization and provision of their armies in future conflicts.
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