Abstract
War is a cause of gains and losses. Economic historians have long stressed the extreme importance of considering the economic potential of society for belligerency, the role of management of chaos to bear the costs of battle and casualties, and ingenious and improvisation methodologies for emergency management. However, global and inter-temporal studies on warring are missing. The adoption of computational tools for data processing is a key modeling option with present day resources. In this paper, hierarchical clustering techniques and multidimensional scaling are used as efficient instruments for visualizing and describing military conflicts by electing different metrics to assess their characterizing features: time, time span, number of belligerents, and number of casualties. Moreover, entropy is adopted for measuring war complexity over time. Although wars have been an important topic of analysis in all ages, they have been ignored as a subject of nonlinear dynamics and complex system analysis. This paper seeks to fill these gaps in the literature by proposing a quantitative perspective based on algorithmic strategies. We verify the growing number of events and an explosion in their characteristics. The results have similarities to those exhibited by systems with increasing volatility, or evolving toward chaotic-like behavior. We can question also whether such dynamics follow the second law of thermodynamics since the adopted techniques reflect a system expanding the entropy.
Highlights
Wars have played a major role in human history, because they have long accounted for violence.According to Blum [1], we presently live in a paradox of power, because on the one hand our means and methods of war have become both more devastating, and on the other hand less devastating.Campbell [2] asks what conception of war to adopt
Wars have been an important topic of analysis in all ages, they have been ignored as a subject of nonlinear dynamics and complex system analysis
We can question whether such dynamics follow the second law of thermodynamics since the adopted techniques reflect a system expanding the entropy
Summary
Wars have played a major role in human history, because they have long accounted for violence. The mathematical analysis of war has relied on developing and interpreting the statistical distributions of casualties [8,9] Such distributions reveal fat-tails, meaning that the size of an event is inversely proportional to its frequency. The entropy analysis of the war casualties, interpreted as the output of a complex system, reveals the human-belligerency trend towards “chaotic-like” behavior over time. This evolution toward a state of higher confusion reveals increasing an entropy, somehow compatible with systems following the second law of thermodynamics.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
