Thursday, May 14, 2009

Defeating Insurgent Wars with Math


So I know that at the very least Lorenzo is going to love this, but this may trip out the rest of you as well. These guys have taken data about conflicts around the world and come up with a constant that represents the organizational structure of terrorist forces in an ongoing campaign. The magic number is 2.5 apparently. If that number can be pushed up, the forces get fragmented and can potentially be left alone to fall apart. If that number can be pushed down, then their organization becomes more robust, but small enough that they can potentially be negotiated with to end fighting. Watch the vid, the main speaker will clarify this stuff far better than I.

1 comment:

defmoose said...

for some reason the player this vid uses is very weird and when I resized the vid to fit on the blog it doesn't actually resize, but cuts off the controls. You can click the image to play it or use the top sliver of the play button on the bottom left corner. Bonus points if anyone can fix this!