Dr Johnson’s team is one of several groups who, in previous papers, have shown that
Richardson’s power law also applies to attacks by terrorists and insurgents.
Posted on 05/12/2011 12:12:09 AM PDT by Cardhu
Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen
IN 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a regular pattern. It was as if the chaos of war seemed to comply with some hitherto unknown law of nature.
At first glance the pattern seems obvious. Richardson found that wars with low death tolls far outnumber high-fatality conflicts. But that obvious observation conceals a precise mathematical description: the link between the severity and frequency of conflicts follows a smooth curve, known as a power law. One consequence is that extreme events such as the world wars do not appear to be anomalies. They are simply what should be expected to occur occasionally, given the frequency with which conflicts take place.
The results have fascinated mathematicians and military strategists ever since. They have also been replicated many times. But they have not had much impact on the conduct of actual wars. As a result, there is a certain “so what” quality to Richardson’s results. It is one thing to show that a pattern exists, another to do something useful with it.
In a paper currently under review at Science, however, Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and his colleagues hint at what that something useful might be.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Dr Johnson’s team is one of several groups who, in previous papers, have shown that
Richardson’s power law also applies to attacks by terrorists and insurgents.
Guy was ahead of his time in many respects.
Bump for later reading.
Interesting theory. It seems to be putting numbers into rough correlation with common sense.
The comments at the original article are very interesting.
If you look back three articles earlier in the forum you’ll find an article about a “Chef” and looking at the previous six articles from there yields two more. That’s three out of six articles in a row about “chefs”. Based upon this I must conclude that Freerepublic is predomiantly about food and cooking! Grandpa Random never sleeps.
Technology can reduce the number of total friendly casualties by providing better targeting data and better accuracy of fire - but so long as hostile fire inflicts any casualties at all, if you aren't taking any friendly fire casualties you are not pressing your firepower advantage hard enough.
In fact, if you are able to inflict a hundred times more casualties than the than your opponent does, the number of total casualties you suffer will be minimized by making the rules of engagement so aggressive that the number of friendly fire casualties actually approximates the number of hostile fire casualties.
Corwallis demonstrated his understanding of the principle in a battle against Greene in the campaign leading up to Yorktown when he was presented with a situation where his flank was about to crumble and he in danger of losing the battle. To the horror of his subordinate officers, Cornwallis ordered his artillery to decimate all the hostile soldiers on that flank - consciously inflicting heavy casualties on his own troops on that flank in order to turn the battle as a whole.
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