Technical Note—Stopping Rules for War Games or Combat Simulations with Exponential Life-Times

Present war game simulations on computers must be run many times because of random outcomes of two-sided conflict that might obscure or not be very sensitive to engineering changes or design objectives for military equipment. Thus, there is a need for stopping rules that will control risks of erroneous judgments in war game simulations or computer games. In view of a new formulation of basic Lanchester combat theory, it is now possible, when games are analyzed in terms of time-to-kill data, to formulate stopping rules in terms of hypothesis testing procedures and reliability theory. This paper develops procedures that not only give explicit stopping rules, but also control the risks of erroneous judgments to acceptable levels for exponential life-times of combat elements.