Resource-Based View of Warfare

Abstract

Now it’s time to bring it all together into a final, unifying tactic. Probably the most significant breakthrough in warfare analysis came from English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson in his 1948 analysis, when he published a data set called “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels,” 1809–1949. In it Richardson provides some of the most comprehensive information on conflict available even today, collected from 779 separate conflicts, and includes data ranging from the size and duration of the conflict, to economic variables such as involvement in trade, to metrics on cultural distinctions between opposing forces participating in the conflict such as dress and marriage customs. The data collected are still being analyzed as of the writing of this book and little has been found that allow for the use of correlated variables to accurately predict the duration or severity of a war. Little, that is, except that Richardson himself discovered a pattern in the frequency of fatal attacks measured cumulatively by duration between the first attack and an attack on any given day thereafter. In other words, the number of fatal attacks that will have occurred cumulatively up until any day after the first attack, in any conflict in history with properly recorded data, will be significantly close to that predicted by a single mathematical formula as follows:

$$({T_n} = {T_n}{n^{ - b}})$$

((1.1))