A Model for Analyzing Artillery Registration Procedures

This paper develops a model that extends and generalizes the methods of the bio-assay analysis by incorporating differing stopping rules, samples per level, and level magnitudes, and applies it to the problem of artillery registration in a decision-theoretic setting. It finds that significant improvements in the procedure currently used by the US Army and Marine Corps field artillery units (in terms of accuracy, timeliness, and ammunition expenditures) may well be possible. The method of analysis is applicable in a wide range of contexts involving “calibration” problems where the variance of the population being tested is known.