Physicist: Predicting Insurgencies Is Easy. As Long as You Dumb Down Your Wars - Katie Drummond, Danger Room.
Insurgencies are easy to predict - no matter where they occur, or why they begin. You just have to assume that all militants care about is appearing on CNN. And that everything there is to know about an insurgency can be found in your local newspaper or in military press releases.
That's the assertion, at least, of New Zealand-based physicist Sean Gourley. The last time we met him, Gourley ... had come up with a tidy-looking equation to explain the chaos of war. Unfortunately, that formula didn't actually work. Last summer, Gourley admitted that he failed to accurately predict the outcome of the 2007 military surge in Iraq - and that his predictions sprang from some rather dubious data. Gourley's formula relied solely on famously sketchy media accounts of insurgent attacks.
Turns out, Gourley was just getting warmed up. Last month, he and his research team published a new paper, "Common ecology quantifies human insurgency," that made it onto the cover of Nature, one of the world's leading science journals. It features an expanded version of Gourley's original formula, and is founded on the idea that insurgencies are "an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes." But strangely, Gourley is repeating - and, in some cases, amplifying - the same missteps he made before. He's still basing his models on press reports and other transparently incomplete data. Now, to make matters worse, he's claiming that militants are fighting just to get that media spotlight...
More at Danger Room.
Comments
Ugh...this is like trying to predict weather out more than a couple weeks. Too many variables. Too many uncertainties. The best you can do is predict, perhaps, a large range where the "human casualties" occur; but even then the standard deviation will be so ridiculous the data will be worthless. Another model (probably a better one) is one put forth by Bueno de Mesquita, also a mathematical based concept. Not a formula for war, but rather one of decision making. It does have an arguably good track record, and is actually used by the CIA.