Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
If you can concentrate more of your force against a small part of the enemy and then exploit that success, you may roll him up with a very low loss exchange ratio - LER.
Sir, thanks for the reply (I may have sounded overly "agressive" in the previous post). What kind of metric/rule-o-thumb would one deploy to ascertain the correct amount of "concentration"? (Isn't that what the 3:1 ration is meant to provde, a shorthand battlefield expedient/reflexive aid). Is that concentration of "fire", "forces" or both? IMO Mearsheimer gives a pretty good defence of the 3:1 rule as a "rule of thumb" but he is careful to qualify that based upon terrain and troops avaliable and limits it's application to a purely frontal offensive situation (i.e., a break through battle).

My interest has been well and truely piqued. Mearsheimer and Dupuy...and the Chimp article is about all I read at Uni on the 3:1 rule so I'd like to be pointed in the direction of further readng material along the lines you suggested (this time...pretty please)