Using a Rayleigh-Based Circular Lethality Coverage for Naval Surface Fire Support

The general mission of naval fire support is to destroy, neutralize, or suppress enemy targets. Naval surface fire support (NSFS) may be provided by naval gunfire or naval air fire. For successful NSFS mission completion, one of the major requirements is to obtain reliable estimates of damage inflicted upon the enemy target. We consider the problem of estimating the probability that NSFS destroys a point target, given that the miss distance variables are normally and independently distributed east -west and north -south of the target. Conventionally, a bivariate normal distribution has often been used to obtain the kill probability in this situation. The main objective of this paper is to find a procedure which facilitates the computation process of the lethality probability by using a Rayleigh distribution. When a circular lethality coverage is assumed, we demonstrated that the kill probability is precisely governed by a Rayleigh distribution.