The TNDM's predictive power is due in large part to the mountain of data on which it draws, thought to be the largest historical combat database in the world. The Dupuy Institute's researchers comb military archives worldwide, painstakingly assembling statistics which reveal cause-and-effect relationships, such as the influence of rainfall on the rate of rifle breakdowns during the Battle of the Ardennes, or the percentage of Iraqi soldiers killed in a unit before the survivors in that unit surrendered during the Gulf war.

Analysts then take a real battle or campaign and write equations linking causes (say, appropriateness of uniform camouflage) to effects (sniper kill ratios). These equations are then tested against the historical figures in the database, making it possible to identify relationships between the circumstances of an engagement and its outcome….

… To model a specific conflict, analysts enter a vast number of combat factors, including data on such disparate variables as foliage, muzzle velocities, dimensions of fordable and unfordable rivers, armour resistance, length and vulnerabilities of supply lines, tank positions, reliability of weapons and density of targets. These initial conditions are then fed into the mathematical model, and the result is a three-page report containing predictions of personnel and equipment losses, prisoner-of-war capture rates, and gains and losses of terrain.