David Rowland’s The Stress of Battle: Quantifying Human Performance in Battle for Historical Analysis and Wargaming

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This is one of the classic works on historical analysis of combat by David Rowland as part of his work in the Ministry of Defence. It was widely recognised for its pioneering research on combat.

The book starts by summarising development of UK MOD historical analysis from studies in the 1970s. Then it analyses exercises, allowed advice to be given on more realistic combat modelling. Using quantitative Historical Analysis (HA), it was possible to compare between the levels of effectiveness between simulated and real combat and to establish combat degradation estimates. The effects of suppression, surprise and shock, were also quantified. The result of this research shed new light on infantry combat, armour v anti-tank weapons and heroism on the battlefield.

The large number of diagrams make the analysis clear and although the book is based around statistics, no in-depth maths is needed to understanding the conclusions.