IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/oropre/v5y1957i6p750-764.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inadequacy of Cost Per “Kill” as Measure of Effectiveness

Author

Listed:
  • John E. Walsh

    (Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, California)

Abstract

Cost per enemy “kill” is a commonly used measure for determining the relative worth of competitive components for a defense system. If the defense system components are employed in such a manner that they do not affect each other, this measure of effectiveness appears to be suitable for many situations. If there are interactions among the components of a defense system, however, a comparison based on cost per enemy “kill” which is not obtained from consideration of the over-all defense system can be misleading. This paper presents an analysis which indicates that such misleading situations often exist. To perform this analysis, a somewhat simplified mathematical model is developed to represent the actions and outcomes of an enemy attack against a defense system. The mathematical model permits partial analytical treatment of moderately complicated attack-defense situations and may be useful in many types of military operations-research work.

Suggested Citation

  • John E. Walsh, 1957. "Inadequacy of Cost Per “Kill” as Measure of Effectiveness," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 5(6), pages 750-764, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:5:y:1957:i:6:p:750-764
    DOI: 10.1287/opre.5.6.750
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.5.6.750
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/opre.5.6.750?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:5:y:1957:i:6:p:750-764. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.