Determining the Importance of Nationality on the Outcome of Battles Using Classification Trees

摘要

Throughout history people have searched for a means of predicting the outcomes of battles. Data analysis is a way of understanding the factors associated with battle outcomes. There are objective factors such as force ratio and subjective factors such as leadership that affect battles. Subjective factors are hard to determine and thus are usually avoided in models. Here nationality is investigated as a surrogate for subjective factors. That is we want to see how nationality is associated with battle outcomes by exploring the best available data set on historical land combat developed by the Center for Army Analysis. We focus on four countries for which there is sufficient data: the USA Germany, Britain and Israel. We find that these countries historically use a substantial amount of military power to defeat their enemies. In particular, the USA often has overwhelming force.