The Relationship Between the Military Loss Resulting from a Casualty and the Days Lost from Active Duty *

The purpose of inflicting wounds on enemy personnel is to cause a military loss. The military tactician has not attempted to translate the severity of a casualty (except possibly for the fatality) into the resulting military loss, despite its obvious importance, probably for lack of a reasonable way to accomplish such a translation. The ballistician, also, needs a method for determining military loss from casualty severity. In designing anti-personnel missiles, the ballistician requires, in the last analysis, information relating the size and velocity at impact of steel fragments to the military loss resulting from the ensuing wound. Of course the severity of the wound caused by a given fragment at a particular velocity will vary, depending on what portion of the body is struck, on the obliquity of the shot, as well as on other factors. If a graded scale of the military severity of wounds is to be found, the most dependable index would seem to be one utilizing some functiion of the wound which the military surgeon is accustomed to appraise. This function the surgeon should be able to estimate even in the hypothetical wounds presented 'by the ballistician and it should also be a functional correlate of wounds which has been reliably and widely recorded in data from the lbaittle field. Such a function is the period of disabilitythe days lost from active duty-caused by the wound. However, the period of disability of a casualty is almost certainly not directly proportional to the military loss thereby experienced by the army. If it were, an incongruous result would arise, with a single casualty causing 100 days lost from duty being presumably equivalent in tactical value to putting each of 10 men out of action for 10 days. It seems unlikely that military commanders would consider such a relationship tactically sound, and missiles or armor designed on such a