Abstract: | This work highlights the problem in military operations of setting safety limits for friendly forces, neutral forces, or civilians, to avoid sustaining unnecessary casualties both in wartime and in training. We present and investigate an analytic model which both enables the quantitative understanding of the inherent problems, and which furnishes a reasonably flexible tool in the hands of the analyst. Characteristic numerical results are displayed and analyzed: They show in particular that prevailing crude approximations are inadequate. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 259–269, 2001 |