Fractality and time correlation in contemporary war

Abstract

Contemporary wars make an extensive use of sophisticated weaponry and communication technologies, which allow more detailed designs of confrontation strategies. In this regard, the present paper focuses on the following questions: (i) Is contemporary war a scale-free social network? (ii) Is there any kind of memory effects in the sequence of daily fatalities in contemporary war? (iii) Is the number of daily attacks non-randomly time distributed? To address this questions, we have studied the 2003–2006 Iraq war. Evidence of fractal scale-invariance is found in the density distribution of military and civilian deaths, which present heavy-tails modeled as fractal power laws. On the other hand, by using detrended fluctuation analysis, our results suggests that daily attacks are time correlated, meaning that an attack is not fully independent from the attacks in previous days. While military fatalities showed a correlation behavior similar to that observed for attacks, civilian fatalities showed a different correlation behavior: if one consider civilian fatalities for time scales within 31 days, the sequence is unpredictable (uncorrelated). However, for time scales larger than 31 days, the sequence of daily civilian fatalities is correlated with correlation behavior similar to that for the daily attack sequence.