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Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern
Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that data collected on the timing of attacks and number of casualties from more than 54,000 events across nine insurgent wars, including those fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 and in Sierra Leone between 1994 and 2003, suggest that insurgencies have a common underlying pattern that may allow the timing of attacks and the number of casualties to be predicted. By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. This means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5). 'We found that the way in which humans do insurgent wars — that is, the number of casualties and the timing of events — is universal,' says team leader Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida. 'This changes the way we think insurgency works.' To explain what was driving this common pattern, the researchers created a mathematical model which assumes that insurgent groups form and fragment when they sense danger, and strike in well-timed bursts to maximize their media exposure. Johnson is now working to predict how the insurgency in Afghanistan might respond to the influx of foreign troops recently announced by US President Barack Obama. 'We do observe a complicated pattern that has to do with the way humans do violence in some collective way,' adds Johnson."
The vast majority of casualties are from insurgents targeting other civilians, not from insurgents targeting multi-national forces. It hasn't been a war since June of 2003... just an extended police action versus a religious or nationalist insurgencies.
Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
Excellent point. But it make me question his definition of an insurgency.
Apparently, an insurgency that's crushed quickly doesn't count as an insurgency. And an insurgency that grows into a civil war doesn't count as an insurgency.
Only if the counter-insurgency is somewhat effective in reducing but not eliminating the number of attacks does he include it in his data set. In conclusion (and most remarkably) the data in his data set show a strong correlation across "insurgencies".
Hmm, well shame on me, I saw the talk existed but expected just a verbal representation of the article.
I had missed the point about stability around alpha. I have to admit the graphs of alpha vs events like the surge or elections are pretty interesting.
Equally interesting though is the rapid return to alpha=2.5. I guess the real question at this point would be: Can repeated examinations of alpha be used to measure the positive effect of a strategy or is it merely a measure of the temporary perturbation and inevitable return to 2.5 because humans are after all humans and 2.5 merely represents the steady state of humans desire for coalescence vs fragmentation.
In short it's a question of cause and effect. Would a different species have a different alpha that's just as stable because it's a reflection of their physiology and psychology.
The research is certainly more interesting than I originally credited, thanks.
I'm not even sure that a major premise of their pattern is correct. From the submission: the researchers created a mathematical model which assumes that insurgent groups form and fragment when they sense danger, and strike in well-timed bursts to maximize their media exposure.
One could probably form a strong argument (perhaps even with a valid mathematical basis) that suggests that so-called "insurgent" actions have worn out their welcome, and news of them floats in a featureless sea of similar actions. It doesn't help the "insurgents'" cause that they have little record for being nice to their own people, so they can only garner support from the most polarised of those they choose to leave alive.
Power laws are ubiquitous in human affairs - almost everything we do as a group involves power laws. This works for the size of cities and the sale of books and traffic to web sites, so I am not surprised it also happens in insurgent attacks.
Whether that will actually result in the effectiveness of Army tactics is another question, and, frankly, I am dubious. The sale of hit records follows a power law, but knowing that doesn't make me into a better musician.
Ehhhh... I don't think so.
A series of searches of "x insurgents killed" yields:
2= 14,700
3= 30,700
4= 164,000
5= 20,000 results
10= 160,000
15= 64,000
20= 306,000
25= 41,000
30= 58,400
31= 10
32= 75,400
33= 4,460
34= 26,400
35= 36,000
40= 57,000
41= 484
42= 28,400
43= 9
44= 1
45= 9,180
I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about how many insurgents are killed at once. How do you decide when an incident starts and ends? Operations can last days. How close do they have to be to each other when they die? I can almost guarantee that we are taking out insurgents one by one or two by two for the most part. They don't run around in packs of 30, they sneak at night in pairs.
That's just my experience, though. Keep your fun little "23" theory.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
These may be useful to you:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/insurgency/etc/graph.html
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/12/iraq_by_the_numbers.php
I can't speak of afghanistan, but in iraq the insurgent attacks were higher and more effective:
-when the ground was dry (moving around in iraq during the rainy season is a nightmare)
-lots of blowing dust in the air, drastically reducing visibility
-around dusk
-toward the end of ramadan
That's just a taste of all the factors that you'd have to account for to get an accurate map of insurgent behavior. Even then, I think it'd be pretty useless, since they are not a regular army and do not usually coordinate among cells. Maybe they want to attack, but the shipment from libya isn't here yet, so they wait for that but now the americans are getting suspicious so they launch all 20 of their libyan mortars at once and high-tail it out of there. Seems like a major, coordinated attack when in reality things are very different.
Guaranteed to make your brain hurt.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.