Mathematicians are building models of how present-day warfare plays out. As they do so, they are coming to the conclusion that it is time to rewrite the military rule book.
In the first World War, the English polymath Frederick Lanchester devised a series of equations to calculate the power balance between opposing forces in a classic symmetric war. Other statistical approaches have been used to make comparisons between wars, concluding that many warfare-related statistics follow a power-law distribution.
Something similar is true of modern asymmetric conflicts, too. Analysing fatality statistics from acts of terrorism since 1968, former SFI Omidyar Fellow Aaron Clauset and colleagues have shown that terrorism produces an even closer fit to a power law than conventional warfare does.
What's more, the precise shape of the power-law curve varies according to location. Terrorist attacks within industrialised nations have a shallower power-law gradient than those in developing nations, indicating that they tend to be fewer in number, but bigger when they do occur (Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol 51, p 58).
Read more about the mathematics of terrorism in the Santa Fe Institute Update:
Online video – Aaron Clauset describes the mathematics of terrorism:
Online video – Seeing Conflict in a New Light, May 19, 2010, conference on the science of conflict, Washington, D.C., co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and the Santa Fe Institute