Hi Oldman,
Thanks a lot for the Saber Measures Charlie report! :-)
Regarding the report's historic background: I think it was a product of the "Fighter Mafia" :-)
My knowledge of that is limited to reading about MILFORUM posts by people who where in the services and in the industry at that time, but I'll try to summarize what I've picked up from their posts (hoping that I don't get it all wrong):
The so-called "Fighter Mafia" was a group that had formed around John F. Boyd, the inventor of the Energy Maneuverability concept. While the USAF was acquiring a decreasing number of increasingly complex fighters, the Fighter Mafia considered this development to be dangerous since they believed that strength was based on numbers.
The Fighter Mafia pushed for the USAF to acquire a large number of inexpensive specialized for the daylight air superiority role. What they didn't want was the F-15, which was the most current result of the "too few complex fighters" development they opposed. What they wanted, and what they got, was the F-16.
(It's pretty ironic that with this kind of background, the F-16 has become an incredibly versatile multi-role aircraft :-)
In 1970 when the Saber Measures Charlie study was prepared, the light-weight fighter (LWF) programme that lead to the F-16 (and the YF-17) might have been in its early stages of conception (I'm not sure of the exact time line). The study, by proving the value of numerical superriority, probably was launched to provide justification for the (then revolutionary) approach of building a simpler fighter instead of a more complex one, and to go for quantity instead of quality.
The connection to the Fighter Mafia is quite obvious from the study:
"INTRODUCTION
The outcome of a particular air-to-air engagement between two opposing aircraft is influenced largely by:
- The relative effectiveness inherent in the two opposing weapon systems as determined by:
Energy-maneuverability
[...]
On a larger scale, the outcome of a conflict between two opposing air forces is determined more than the aggregate of individual engagements [...]
This study attempts to illuminate the gross influence of the latter factor - relative strengths."
Think "John F. Boyd", "F-16", and "Light Weigt Fighter" :-)
"OBSERVATIONS
Quantitative analysis of historical data tends strongly to support the professional intuition to employ the principle of Mass in air-to-air combat. The benefits of Mass are dramatic; if a commander has a strength advantage, he may markedly reducce his own loss rate while greatly increasing the loss rate of his opponent [...]"
Again, this anticipates the goal of the LWF program - to acquire large numbers of cheap yet highly capable air-superiority fighters.
So much to the background :-)
With regard to our original topic, the study obviously relied entirely on data from the Reinburg paper you already mentioned. From the overview given in Saber Measures, Reinburg relied on multiple sources and a bit of guesswork :-) It sounds like he very probably relied on Luftwaffe numbers somewhere in his study, but it also sounds as if he didn't do so uncritically. The tables I quoted from Saber Measures via Spick are referenced as page 345 of the Reinburg papers, so it looks like a heavyweight study compared to Saber Measures which is - appropriately ;-) - light-weight.
About the only thing we can really learn about the accuracy of the Reinburg numbers is that in Saber Measures, they yield nicely symmetric results for the WW2 engagements, which could be taken as a sign that neither side overclaimed worse than the other side.
The Korean War curves are highly asymmetric, and I think recent research indicates that "Blue" overclaimed quite a bit. ("Red" did too, and even worse, but in 1970 the USAF didn't have access to Soviet figures :-) Still, there can be no doubt that even corrected figures still would show a marked asymmetry in favour of "Blue".
Regarding the methods of the Saber Measures study, I'd say the exclusion of certain data points seems a bit arbitrary, and the curve fitting is done without providing any measure of the quality of the fit. Using eyeball assessment, I'd suspect the correlation to be a bit on the weak side perhaps ;-)
I think that's all I can say to Saber Measures Charley. Quite interesting as it shows how some people 30 years back looked back another 30 years, but I agree it's not particularly useful for us (or anyone, I'd suspect) today.
Sudden inspiration: It might be interesting to try and extract similar statistics as used in the study from the events in the online arena and see how it fiction compares to reality! ;-)
Thanks again for the report! It was really fun to try and get the jigsaw pieces to fit :-)
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
