A chemical casualty model

Abstract

Currently, to plan chemical weapons' use on the battlefield, planners use the classified chemical weapon effects tables contained in FM 3-10B and look up the expected casualties based on the meteorological and target conditions. This can be a lengthy and time-consuming process especially when many weapons are available andor many targets are under consideration. Mathematical models could significantly improve both the speed and accuracy of the current procedure and thus allow chemical weapons to be exercised more frequently. This thesis develops a model for one chemical agent and delivery system. A large simulation experiment was conducted to gather the expected number of casualties for each combination of meteorological and target conditions. The results were then fit to one model through multivariate regression to provide one equation that models the expected number of casualties from this one agent. Future work could easily expand on this effort to include other agents and weapon systems.