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<p>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. Using classification tree models, with a correct classification rate of 79 percent, the results suggest that nationality was the most important factor in battles before World War I and the second most important factor during the World Wars. Force ratio was the most important factor in WWI and artillery ratio in WWII. In the years following WWII, the dominant variable has been air force ratio.
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<br>Subjects: Military art and science; War games</div>
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Cakan, Ali</div>
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