A few months back I wrote a post discussing Sean Gourley’s TED talk on the Mathematics of War; specifically, noting that his finding (a power-law distribution of attack frequency and severity in Iraq) was—well—old news. This set off an excellent discussion on, Sean’s work, my comments, and more generally how the social and hard sciences can clash. More recently, Tom Ricks of The Best Defense blog revisited Sean’s talk with his own skepticism, which induced a response from Sean, and further skepticism by Ricks. In defense of his work, Sean responded to Tom’s post with the following:
With this new approach we can do several important things that were not possible before. We can understand the underlying structure of an insurgency i.e. how an insurgency ‘decides’ to distribute its forces (weapons, people, money etc). Further, we can explain why this kind of insurgent structure emerges in multiple different conflict zones around the world. We can estimate the number of autonomous insurgent groups operating within a theatre of war. We can monitor and track a conflict through time to see how either sides strategies are affecting the state of the war. Finally we can compare the mathematical patterns of current ongoing wars with past wars to estimate how close they are to ending.
I think Sean’s work in extremely important, as in many ways our research interests run parallel and this project has great potential. That said, his response leaves me with more questions than answers, therefore, with Sean’s response in hand I would like to revisit the mathematics of war.
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