On Lethality: Toward a More Complete Definition and Formation of the Lethality Framework

John M. Hinck, Robert S. Hinck, Jayson A. Altieri, and David R. Jarnot
©2025 John M. Hinck, Robert S. Hinck, Jayson A. Altieri, and David R. Jarnot

ABSTRACT: This article argues lethality should be conceptualized as a holistic and regenerative process in which adversarial militaries prepare for, adapt to, and sustain the application of force in conflict. Whereas the literature on lethality is widening to include the human war fighter, attempts to define and measure lethality have proven problematic—a struggle this article seeks to remedy. Drawing on historical, doctrinal, and interdisciplinary perspectives, the authors argue that lethality includes the capacity to kill and elements of learning and adaptation. The proposed lethality framework offers policy and military practitioners a model for assessing and operationalizing lethality in military education, leadership development, and Joint force integration.

Keywords: lethality framework, procedural lethality, adaptive lethality, regenerative lethality, vitality

Lethality has become a defining term in US military strategy, invoked in doctrines, speeches, curricula, mindsets, and acquisition plans as a benchmark for readiness and effectiveness. Yet, despite prominent usages of the term lethality, the concept remains poorly defined and inconsistently applied across service branches and operational contexts. Often equated with the capacity to kill or destroy, lethality is typically grounded in quantitative, technoscientific metrics that emphasize weapon performance over human factors. Such narrow definitions are increasingly inadequate in today’s complex operational environment, which is shaped by rapid technological change, multidomain operations, and the evolving character of war.¹

This article begins by tracing the historical development and limitations of current lethality metrics then introduces vitality as a critical enabler, argues for a more complete and integrated definition of lethality that expands beyond physical effects to include adaptive human performance and systemic resilience, and culminates in a novel framework for understanding and applying lethality in modern warfare. It introduces the lethality framework, which redefines lethality as the capability of a weapon, system, or force to kill the vitality of personnel or render materiel ineffective, leading to mission success. The lethality framework consists of three interrelated constructs: procedural lethality (task proficiency), adaptive lethality (an innovative response to dynamic conditions), and regenerative lethality (the capacity to sustain and restore lethal effectiveness). At its core, the article highlights vitality—the power to develop, endure, and succeed again—as a foundational enabler of lethality. By proposing a more comprehensive definition of lethality and offering an integrated framework for its development, this article informs how the United States fights and how it prepares to fight and refight, ensuring lethality is commonly measurable and meaningful in the context of twenty-first-century warfare.²

Framing Lethality and Current Limitations

In framing any concept, definitional concerns, tensions, and limitations emerge. Such issues appear in discussions of lethality—a term which, despite its frequent usage in contemporary war discourse, lacks a universally agreed-upon definition.³ Whereas the professional study of lethality originated from public health efforts to manage morbidity in population groups, the concept became a way of thinking about and optimizing killing after World War I. Still, not until Trevor N. Dupuy’s 1964 report, Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality, did lethality become codified in military parlance.

Credited with first theorizing and defining lethality in military terms, Dupuy approached the study of lethality scientifically by quantifying combat factors as a means to predict battlefield outcomes. Dupuy’s definitions of lethality ranged from the “destructive power, of weapons” to “the ability to injure and if possible to kill people.”⁴ Eventually, Dupuy came to see lethality as “the inherent capability of a given weapon to kill personnel or make materiel ineffective.”⁵ This capability included elements such as range, rate of fire, accuracy, and mobility, culminating in Dupuy’s Theoretical Lethality Index, which offered one of the first quantitative metrics for conceptualizing lethality by calculating how many people a weapon could kill in one hour.⁶

Dupuy’s approach continues to inspire conceptualizations and understandings of lethality, but scholars who argue lethality is also socially constructed and tied to narratives, doctrine, and the legitimization of military force, use epistemological technique to challenge scientific approaches.⁷ In a social context, scientific assessments of lethality may claim to be objective, but the measures they employ and the underlying notions of what “lethal” means remain subjective and contextually bounded. This subjectivity implicates the purchasing of munitions and weapon systems, as well as doctrinal and typical notions of lethality (notions that emphasize killing or incapacitating adversaries), which engender a preference in US doctrine for kinetic actions. Evident in the development of population-centric counterinsurgency, such traditional notions of lethality proved incomplete during the war on terrorism and required the United States to consider how to use force legitimately to win hearts and minds.⁸

With the transition to great-power competition came a renewed focus on enhancing combat lethality. The US Department of War frames lethality as a cornerstone of strategic readiness and modernization.⁹ The 2018 National Defense Strategy repeatedly emphasized building a “more lethal force” by integrating artificial intelligence, precision weapons, and adaptive force structures. The 2022 National Defense Strategy described lethality as a core component of strengthening and sustaining deterrence.¹⁰ But the trend of emphasizing lethality has also received some critiques. Lethality may be necessary for strategic success, but lethality is far from sufficient; lethal tactical actions can fail to produce strategic success and technological superiority alone does not guarantee victory.¹¹ As the United States learned in the Vietnam War, overwhelming US firepower and technological superiority do not always translate into victory, suggesting a need to broaden lethality’s definition beyond physical effects to include influence and legitimacy.¹²

Beyond technical considerations is the growing emphasis on human performance as a determinant of lethality. Advocates of measuring lethality on the individual level focus on developing rubrics that encompass marksmanship, mental acuity, and physical endurance, suggesting lethality should be assessed much like athletic performance.¹³ An example of this focus on individual lethality is the Close Combat Lethality Task Force. The task force highlights how cognitive, physical, and social performance factors make up the human dimension that shapes a unit’s battlefield effectiveness.¹⁴

Although these considerations of lethality widen the concept’s scope beyond material weapons to include individual and team dynamics, two issues arise from measurement practices in these areas. The first is a challenge all measurement systems share, in which the very act of measurement can change the value of what is being measured. That is, when individuals become aware that an indicator forms the basis of an evaluation, they work toward that metric rather than the outcome the metric intends to gauge.¹⁵ When this challenge occurs, personnel train for tests and units chase metrics, rather than assessing battlefield success or mission accomplishment. Such measurement practices risk distorting individuals’ beliefs in their capabilities. Measurements also generate vulnerabilities as adversaries learn of them.¹⁶

The second issue is whether current lethality metrics address the competencies, skills, or attributes needed to meet the challenges of the future character of war. As then-General Mark A. Milley and former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt warn, US personnel are ill-equipped and ill-trained to grapple with the strategic and ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.¹⁷ As naval combat models show, high-lethality environments can yield unpredictable outcomes, complicating military decision making.¹⁸ Others stress the importance of competencies such as technical expertise and innovative thinking, adaptability, and resilience, which are key to competing successfully in a future environment.¹⁹ Such soft skills are easily overlooked in discussions of lethality due to the term’s connotation of war fighting.²⁰ The fact that the human agents involved in the lethality chain exclude key competencies from their mindsets and frameworks of emotional intelligence is notable and troubling, further emphasizing the need for a deeper examination of what lethality entails.

To avoid the pitfalls of manipulating metrics and to connect lethality more directly to battlefield effects, recent scholarship advocates for distinguishing between concepts of procedural and adaptive lethality. Procedural lethality is conceptualized as “performance where a military unit would be highly lethal within the context for which they trained. . . . limited to a specific skill, weapon, or mission type.”²¹ This definition maps onto most military personnel’s current training, which enables them to master certain skills by passing specific tests or obtaining certifications. Adaptive lethality, in contrast, describes how “a unit can be lethal in multiple and novel contexts across various skills and mission types.”²² The concept of adaptive lethality exceeds the performance of specific skills to include personnel’s abilities to achieve mission success when conditions change, thus interrupting or causing a standardized procedure to lose effectiveness.²³

The distinction between procedural and adaptive lethality is useful but still defines lethality as a concept that only concerns the physiological incapacitation of adversaries, eschewing questions of psychology and adversarial will.²⁴ The intent in distinguishing between these concepts of lethality and the purpose of considering only physical incapacitation is to avoid the messiness of subjective assessments of lethality. This practice, however, continues the technoscientific impulse to define lethality as easily measurable “kinetic effects.” Avoiding subjectivity ignores the social, psychological, and ethical dimensions of future warfare and attempts to imbue war with a level of scientific certainty unbefitting of its foundational, human characteristics.²⁵ These effects reemphasize the need to reassess lethality as a socio-technical phenomenon—not merely a training assessment.

From Metrics to Doctrine: Conceptualizations of Lethality in Joint Service Publications

The aforementioned themes, tensions, and limitations of conceptualizing lethality are evident in US doctrine. Lethality became a core objective in the first Donald J. Trump administration and remains a core principle for the Department of War under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in the second Trump administration. But Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, contains no definition of “lethal” or “lethality,” despite using these words 16 times in characterizing a range of terms, from “unmanned aerial vehicles” to “weaponeering.”²⁶ This lack of definition gives service branches free rein to apply and adapt the concept differentially based on US Code Title 10 requirements. Although lethality is applied to the full spectrum of warfare in the air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains in the twenty-first century, the term lacks a common conceptualization, which risks creating confusion and divergent perspectives about how lethality is understood, applied, developed, and measured.

For the US Army and the US Marine Corps, lethality primarily resides within the individual, and both service branches invest in metrics to quantify individual capacities. The Army, for instance, defines “lethality” in several publications, including in Operations, Field Manual 3-0, as “the capability and capacity to destroy.”²⁷ Regarding force development, “Army Directive 2017–24 (Cross Functional Team Pilot in Support of Materiel Development)” defines lethality as being grounded in the Army’s basic combat formation—the soldier. Under the Army model, “[⁠s⁠]⁠oldiers and squads are the foundation of the decisive force and must be organized, equipped, and trained with superior lethality, situational awareness, mobility, and protection that provides the overmatch required to defeat capable and determined adversaries in complex operating environments.”²⁸ Soldier lethality spans the fundamentals: shooting, moving, communicating, protecting, sustaining, and training to enable the Army’s combat power and systems to dominate the twenty-first-century battlefield.

Like its Army land-warfare counterpart, the Marine Corps’ conceptualization of lethality has a boots-on-the-ground focus; specifically, on marine riflemen and their support of air, land, and sea weapon systems. Whereas, Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, does not define the term “lethality,” the Marine Corps uses the term as a foundational principle. Most notably, in 2024, US Marine Corps Training and Education Command Commanding General Benjamin T. Watson signed and released the Marksmanship Campaign Plan. The plan, developed after years of research, offered a clear, measurable definition of lethality and provided marines with standardized metrics to assess and enhance their effectiveness in combat scenarios along five key attributes: speed, precision, executive control, adaptability, and risk exposure.²⁹

In contrast to the Army and the Marine Corps, the US Navy, the US Air Force, and the US Space Force conceive of lethality in more operational, technological, and spatial terms, moving the object and emphasis of lethality away from individuals and toward weapon platforms and force projection. The Navy approaches lethality through its concept of distributed lethality. Introduced in January 2015, distributed lethality represented a paradigm shift from a defensive to an offensive posture that enhances tactical proficiency and operational readiness and aims to defeat adversaries’ anti-access / area-denial capabilities.³⁰ As the Navy’s surface-warfare leadership explains, distributed lethality creates small, adaptive, offensive force packages comprising surface action groups with a variety of support elements that operate across a wide region and under an adversary’s anti-access / sea-denial umbrella. Such packages intend to confound adversaries’ location and targeting abilities while threatening their sea-control ambitions.³¹ The goal is to place the burden of making defensive considerations onto adversarial navies while also enabling the concealment and deception of allied forces to inject uncertainty and complexity into adversarial targeting. Specifically created to meet future security challenges, the concept comes with new risks and challenges as well: “distributed lethality means distributed vulnerability.”³²

In terms of Air Force doctrine, Operations, Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-0, mentions “lethal” or “lethality” 11 times but does not define either word and describes the concept of “forcible action,” which incorporates the concept of lethality into its definition.³³ Forcible action requires the United States to apply military force violently, projecting the will of the United States onto an enemy by eliminating its resistance. The publication states, “Defeating an enemy creates the conditions to impose the desired strategic outcome, usually through exhaustion, attrition, and/or destruction to the point of annihilation.”³⁴ Operations further defines the role of “fires” as the use of weapon systems or other actions to have lethal or nonlethal effects on a target.³⁵ Taken together, the Air Force’s conceptualizations of lethality can be summarized as the ability to create airpower effects across a theater or the entire globe through control and exploitation in, from, and through the air. Like in the Navy, Air Force lethality goes beyond a characteristic of an individual or weapon system to include a relational dimension aimed at threatening the adversary’s physical and cognitive or psychological composition.

The concept of lethality is perhaps most opaque in Space Force doctrine. Like Air Force doctrine, Space Force doctrine does not specifically define lethality, but Operations, Space Doctrine Publication 3-0, references the words “lethal” and “lethality” 11 times in the context of space and Joint effects’ abilities to exploit the position of advantage within the space domain. To accomplish its mission, the Space Force executes space operations in an environment that includes peer and near-peer competitors. By concentrating forces to control lines of communication, the Space Force achieves space superiority and enables Joint lethality, without the fiscal and political costs stemming from pursuing space supremacy.³⁶ Within this competitive environment, lethality is understood relationally as US adversaries see the US competitive advantages as deriving from its space capabilities and view shortfalls in the resilience of US space capabilities as vulnerabilities.³⁷ The Space Force thus sees lethality as a positional, technological, and networked advantage relative to the advantage of one’s adversaries. Table 1 summarizes and compares how lethality is defined in Joint and service doctrines.

Finally, a survey of Joint and service-specific doctrinal publications indicates the US military sees lethality through the lens of one’s capability and capacity to neutralize or destroy an enemy target. Lethality is thus a critical component of combat effectiveness.³⁸ More importantly, lethality refers to a unit’s ability to defeat adversaries and achieve mission objectives by encompassing factors like the capability of weapons, tactics, and training, as well as soldiers’ overall readiness.³⁹ Accordingly, lethality is enabled by formations or systems maneuvering into positions of relative advantage where they can employ weapon systems and mass effects to destroy enemy forces or place them at risk of destruction.⁴⁰ In simple terms, lethality is about how well a unit can carry out its mission and neutralize threats during combat.⁴¹

Taken together, US doctrinal publications use the term “lethality” frequently but apply it differentially. The objects to which these publications apply lethality are different, as are lethality’s intended effects. Whereas capability and capacity are shared concerns, US doctrine emphasizes projecting lethality toward the adversary, which neglects the complexity of the modern battlefield, including the broader interactive effects and systemic dynamics by which one’s own and others’ lethal capabilities emerge and are contested.

The Role of Vitality in Lethality

In January 2018, then–Chief of Staff of the US Air Force General David L. Goldfein endorsed the release of the squadron vitality report. The report’s objective was to take proactive steps to strengthen and prepare the Air Force for the next major conflict in defense of the nation. The report conceptualized squadron vitality as the key enabler driving Air Force lethality.⁴² Beyond defining key attributes of vitality specific to the Air Force squadron, the report more broadly contextualized how lethality can be understood and developed; namely, it provided insight into the linkage between vitality and lethality.

From an etymological perspective, vitality (from the Latin vita, meaning “life”) and lethality (from the Latin lethum, meaning “death”) appear to exist as an oppositional dichotomy. But when understood relationally, vitality becomes adjacent to lethality and a core enabler of generating and regenerating lethality, which marks an emergent condition in which lethality intends to affect the vitality of a target, but the lethal dose required to achieve the intended effect is contingent upon the target’s size, health, and ability to respond.⁴³ In other words, a species or organism may face the destruction of its body or habitat but still have time to adapt, heal, or evolve without incurring long-term harm, highlighting the dynamic, systemic effects mediating lethal threats to one’s being. Accordingly, an organism’s vitality influences its ability to be lethal and its ability to withstand lethal threats from others.

The work of evolutionary philosopher and psychologist Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” provides a practical underpinning when evaluating the relationship between vitality and lethality. Spencer defined vitality as being closely related to a system’s degree of readiness to change. He asserted, as a system’s complexity and dynamic nature increase, the need for simultaneous and successive change, in correspondence with external constraints and sequences, must also increase to enable one to live within the new equilibrium.⁴⁴ Plainly stated, the ability to adapt is the structural expression of vitality.

This idea of adaptation resonates in the more modern work of management scholar Leon C. Megginson, who paraphrased Charles Darwin’s ideas by stating, “it is not the strongest that survives; but the species . . . that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment.”⁴⁵ Megginson’s insights extended beyond Spencer’s biological-system view, arguing the same concepts apply to humans and civilizations that must adapt to endure periods of significant change. Modern warfare can therefore be understood as a system-on-system competition in which the relative speed and scale at which innovation occurs and is implemented are the most important elements in a military’s long-term competitiveness.⁴⁶ Such concepts are also present in the idea of network-centric warfare, in which changes in the character of warfare center around networked operations that demand comprehensive integration and resilience to achieve credible combat effectiveness.⁴⁷

Although the character of war continuously evolves through advances in technology, the nature of war suggests victory resides within the human agents operating and adapting such systems in dynamic environments. As Carl von Clausewitz stated, war is a violent, human struggle, “the collision of two living forces” occurring in “the realm of uncertainty.”⁴⁸ As “unforeseen gaps in weapons, doctrine, and tactics . . . will become clear only after the fighting starts,” the unpredictability of future conflict means service branches must become learning organizations capable of continuously adapting and improving. Service branches can achieve this goal by fostering cultures in which individuals and teams expand their capacities to create desired results.⁴⁹ One’s adaptive capacity thus falls to physiological lethality or mental acuity, as well as one’s learning capability, including elements of mind, heart, and hands—concepts originating from the ecological literacy and sustainability work of David Orr in 1992.⁵⁰

Developed as a model for teaching and learning, Orr’s framework emphasizes the fact that teaching, learning, and cultivating sustainability, and by extension, vitality, require the integration of cognitive knowledge and critical thinking (mind); affective orientation and emotional intelligence (heart); and action, application, and skill (hands).⁵¹ Such elements can be honed and cultivated as attributes of vitality, resulting in the adaptive capacity necessary to be more lethal. This view parallels Spencer’s and Megginson’s ideas by positioning vitality as the driver of a cycle in which lethality is not the starting point and is instead the outcome of a resilient and adaptive system that operates continuously. In Orr’s framework, vitality is not a counterpoint to lethality; vitality is a precursor and predictor of success in the dynamic operational environment expected in great-power competition.

A More Complete Definition of Lethality and the Lethality Framework

Conducting a comprehensive assessment of lethality requires moving beyond old metrics like Dupuy’s Theoretical Lethality Index to include human performance models and ecological approaches combined with probabilistic combat simulations.⁵² To guard against metric distortion, assessments of lethality should avoid an overreliance on lethality to destroy physiological life (or to kill) and should include the elements necessary to achieve enduring mission success.

Creating a renewed, complete definition of lethality requires an interdisciplinary approach, and any such framework must define lethality, articulate its key components, and consider the entirety of the human charged with executing lethality. As the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War illustrates, military organizations compete in dynamic environments in which those organizations adapt lethal tactics to battlefield necessities and generate new tactics and stratagems emerging from the relative resources and competitive advantages of the entities engaged in conflict.⁵³ Such activities demonstrate one’s lethal capabilities symbolically, for example, when Ukraine established its ability to strike deep into Russian territory. Such demonstrations simultaneously undermine the adversary’s confidence and sense of control over the battlefield while bolstering one’s morale and agency to resist.⁵⁴ The ability to remain resilient and adaptive when conflict breaks out is a product of will and ingenuity and speaks to the need to ensure one’s lethal advantage by building a resilient defense ecosystem that can “withstand, fight through, and recover quickly from disruption.”⁵⁵ With this goal in mind, the authors propose the lethality framework (see figure 1).

Figure 1. The lethality framework
(Source: Created by authors)

First, this framework redefines lethality as the capability of a weapon, system, or force to kill the vitality of personnel or render materiel ineffective, leading to mission success. Second, building on the literature on lethality, in addition to the literature about mission command and mission success, lethality comprises three constructs: procedural lethality, defined as the process or sequence of steps required to achieve mission success; adaptive lethality, defined as the ability to transform according to the presented conditions to achieve mission success; and regenerative lethality, which is a new construct used to describe the foundational elements that continuously enable the attainment of personal and organizational vitality.⁵⁶ This framework presents vitality as a core enabler of generating and regenerating lethality. Vitality, defined as the power of developing and enduring to succeed again, is key to continued individual, team, and systemic performance. The authors propose three subelements of regenerative lethality to encompass the entirety of the human involved in applying lethality: mind elements, comprising cognitive and psychological sets of beliefs; heart elements, including affective or emotional sets of values; and hand elements, reflecting behavioral or physiological sets of skills.

Put into practice, the lethality framework views enacting the procedural lethality required to achieve mission success as being the aim of friendly forces. Procedural lethality becomes tied to materiel and to training, which enables members to wield materiel efficaciously during combat. This view of procedural lethality aligns with the Department of War current articulation of lethality, which highlights the importance of developing a force with a level of lethality that deters adversarial action. The Department of War articulation reflects Clausewitz’s notion of threats, in which “the possibility of future military action [is] based on the disposition of the forces at that time.”⁵⁷

But as battlefield conditions change, the need for adaptive lethality emerges. The complexity threshold separates procedural from adaptive lethality, as confrontations between competing militaries require organizations to build new stratagems, use technologies and materiel in novel ways, and adjust or transform lethality to achieve mission success. The human domain must develop this adaptive capacity through elements including individual and organizational character, trust, risk acceptance, innovation, empowerment, and agility; individuals’ confidence in themselves and the larger units in which they operate; and collaboration between Joint Forces.

The target of procedural and adaptive lethality is the vitality of the adversary. Tactical strikes enervate specific aspects of the adversary’s lethal capabilities (or operational targets) while the accumulative effects render the adversary subdued so continued resistance is undesirable (constituting a strategic target). The capability to sustain such efforts, and resist them, emerges from one’s regenerative lethality. As adversarial forces attempt to break friendly forces’ beliefs so doubt clouds their minds, break trust so friendly forces lose the will to fight, and kill friendly forces so they are unable to support the war effort, friendly forces simultaneously attempt to build back or reinforce elements of mind (beliefs), heart (values), and hand (skills). War and the deeper elements of lethality reside in the duality of vitality and lethality, with vitality—the power of developing and enduring to succeed again—being central to, and part of, what being lethal means.

Although proposing a definition of lethality can feel like opening a can of worms, the definition drives a deeper discussion about lethality. The intent of the definition and the lethality framework is to provide a way to examine the complexity of lethality holistically rather than continuing to reduce lethality to killing. Lethality entails a trade-off, where precise measurements in terms of physiological contributions require a less holistic view of combat. This trade-off occurs because factors like sustainment; psychological factors (for example, the will to fight); or technological issues (the other two components of the lethality framework) are omitted. The lethality definition, framework, and trade-off go to the heart of the authors’ argument that the lethality framework is a holistic model for assessing and operationalizing lethality across tactical, operational, and strategic levels, making it a relevant and necessary tool for military education, leadership development, and Joint force integration.

Conclusion

Further research should examine how military leaders and theorists interpret lethality, how sustainment differs from regenerative lethality, how the Army’s sustainment approach to lethality differs from other doctrines (such as distributed lethality or space-based lethality), and the role resilience plays in lethality. Future research should also apply the lethality framework to various conflicts. Additionally, linking the Marine Corps’ speed, precision, executive control, adaptability, and risk exposure framework with the Army’s sustainment doctrine would be beneficial and would enable a more practical implementation of the lethality framework with an emphasis on “mind” and “heart” in training and assessment regimes.

As warfare becomes more complex, militaries must move beyond narrow, technoscientific definitions of lethality rooted solely in kinetic effects and weapon performance. This article proposes a more complete and integrated definition of lethality that includes procedural, adaptive, and regenerative dimensions, all underpinned by the enabling force of vitality. By framing lethality as the capability to destroy the vitality of an adversary’s systems, personnel, or materiel while protecting and preserving friendly forces in pursuit of mission success, the proposed lethality framework aligns with the human, cognitive, and systemic challenges of twenty-first-century conflict. The framework’s approach also repositions human adaptability, emotional intelligence, and resilience as vital components of combat effectiveness. In adopting the lethality framework’s approach, this article addresses gaps in doctrine, mitigates the pitfalls of distorted metrics, and supports the cultivation of lethal forces prepared for dynamic and uncertain operational environments. Lethality, thus redefined, becomes a strategic outcome of a resilient, adaptive, and vital force ready to fight again and again.

John M. Hinck
John M. Hinck (PhD, University of San Diego) is an associate professor of leadership studies and director of VECTOR (the Center of Excellence for Learning Professionals) at Air University. He teaches core courses and leadership electives at the Air War College and the Air Command and Staff College and teaches Air University’s Leader Development Course for Squadron Command. His experience includes serving as an Apache Longbow pilot and an Army colonel with multiple combat and Joint tours and 82 months of command. He is the author of more than 45 books, chapters, and articles. Hinck’s 2022 book, Badges of Honor, is about leadership, character, and values.

Robert S. Hinck
Robert S. Hinck (PhD, Texas A & M University) is an associate professor at Air University. His research is published in more than 20 academic journals, including The International Journal of Press/Politics, the International Journal of Strategic Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, the Russian Journal of Communication, and the Asian Journal of Communication. Hinck is the lead author of the 2022 book, The Future of Global Competition: Ontological Security and Narratives in Chinese, Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan Media.

Jayson A. Altieri
Jayson A. Altieri is an assistant professor of leadership studies at Air University. He teaches the Leader Development Course for Squadron Command and core courses at the Air War College. His experience includes serving in several national security–level assignments with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NATO, and the National War College. Altieri is the author or coauthor of more than 60 publications, including his 2024 book, A Guest of Mr. Lincoln: The Wartime Service of Sergeant Joseph W. Wheeless, Confederate States Army.

David R. Jarnot
David R. Jarnot serves as the director of the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Leader Development Course for Squadron Command, where he oversees the development and delivery of experiential education for emerging leaders in the Department of the Air Force. His work focuses on cultivating leaders through evidence-based practices and innovative curriculum design. Jarnot’s most recent research thesis, “Enhancing Leader Development: The Use of Assessments and Constructive Developmental Theory,” explores innovative methods for advancing the growth of leaders in complex environments.

Endnotes

1. 1. Matthew Ford, “The Epistemology of Lethality: Bullets, Knowledge Trajectories, Kinetic Effects,” European Journal of International Security 5, no. 1 (2020): 1–28.
2. 2. Adam T. Biggs et al., “The Lethality Paradox: Goodhart’s Law and the Challenge of Measuring Lethality,” The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation 22, no. 2 (2023): 1–9.
3. 3. Olivia Garard, “Lethality: An Inquiry,” The Strategy Bridge, November 1, 2018, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/11/1/lethality-an-inquiry; Ford, “Epistemology of Lethality,” 1–28; and Biggs et al., “Lethality Paradox,” 197–205.
4. 4. Trevor N. Dupuy, Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality (Historical Evaluation and Research Organization, 1964), 6; Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1979), 18–34; Trevor N. Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1980), 286; and Trevor N. Dupuy, Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War (NOVA Publications, 1995), 25.
5. 5. Dupuy, Evolution of Weapons, 285–87; Dupuy, Attrition, 25; Katie Lange, “National Defense Strategy: Lethality,” Department of Defense, October 8, 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/1656335/national-defense-strategy-lethality/; W. A. Rivera and Arnel P. David, “Towards a More Comprehensive Understanding of Lethality,” Small Wars Journal, February 11, 2019, https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/towards-more-comprehensive-understanding-lethality; and Shawn Woodford, “Trevor Dupuy’s Definitions of Lethality,” The Dupuy Institute (blog), July 16, 2019, https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/07/16/trevor-dupuys-definitions-of-lethality/.
6. 6. Dupuy, Evolution of Weapons, 285–87; and Darrell A. H. Miller and Jennifer Tucker, “Common Use, Lineage, and Lethality,” UC Davis Law Review 55, no. 5 (June 2022): 2495–513.
7. 7. Ford, “Epistemology of Lethality,” 4–8.
8. 8. Ford, “Epistemology of Lethality,” 2.
9. 9. “Guided by National Defense Strategy, Defense Department Increases Force Lethality,” Department of Defense, August 5, 2020, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/article/article/2300576/guided-by-national-defense-strategy-defense-department-increases-force-lethality/; and “Secretary Hegseth’s Message to the Force,” U.S. Department of War, January 25, 2025, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4040940/secretary-hegseths-message-to-the-force/.
10. 10. “Guided by National Defense.”
11. 11. Bernard F. W. Loo, “The Challenges Facing 21st Century Military Modernization,” PRISM 8, no. 3 (2020): 147–53; and Rivera and David, “More Comprehensive Understanding.”
12. 12. Rivera and David, “More Comprehensive Understanding.”
13. 13. Zachary J. Krapfl, “Defining and Assessing Lethality,” NCO Journal (February 2019): 1–5, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/nco-journal/docs/2019/February/Lethality/Assessing-Lethality.pdf.
14. 14. Tim Fish, “Soldier Modernisation: Lessons in Lethality,” Army Technology, January 3, 2023, https://www.army-technology.com/features/soldier-modernisation-lessons-in-lethality/.
15. 15. Biggs et al., “Lethality Paradox,” 197–205.
16. 16. Biggs et al., “Lethality Paradox,” 197–205.
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