Broadening the Damage Function in Modeling an Array of Military Applications

Among the many characteristics associated with weapon systems, perhaps the most critical is a weapon's effectiveness against specified point or area targets. For many years, damage functions have been developed to facilitate efforts in modeling or simulating the effects of military combat operations. With their ease in evaluating the expected probability of a target destroyed, damage functions serve as a valuable tool in military predictive analyses and decision-making processes. The symmetric nature of the damage function, however, limits its application toward a wide number of military scenarios where destruction levels extend beyond one dimension. In contrast, this research proposes a variant of the traditional function to account for asymmetric damage in military operations. Using a simulation-based approach, this alternative model is compared with existing functions used in assessing degrees of damage achieved against a particular target. Several applications of the proposed damage function are also provided