Abstract. The victory function (VF) in combat and special operations is a separate class of contest success functions (CSFs) describing the probability of a participant’s success in a competition or conflict. This paper briefly characterizes aggregate functions, which include production functions, utility functions, CSFs, power (might) indices of countries, etc. Substantive (postulates) and formal (axioms, properties) requirements for the VF are given. Probabilistic (based on A.N. Kolmogorov’s law of target destruction and the Weibull distribution) and substantive (based on the framework of military science and practice) justifications of the VF are presented. Economic models of conflict and appropriation are overviewed. Using the security model and the VF, three problems of distributing a disputed resource (territory and population) between countries are formulated. A promising line of further research is to develop conflict theory at several levels, namely, in the theater of military operations, the intercountry, and geopolitical levels.
Keywords: mathematical model, security, combat and special operations, victory function, postulates of conflict technology, models of conflict and appropriation, military cybernetics.
The Victory Function and Its Application in Conflict Modeling