Like the ancient Greco-Buddhist colossi of Bamiyan, the High-Modernist era Kajaki dam is a product of foreign influences and has been a mute witness as well as an occasional victim of domestic political disarray and failed attempts to integrate and incorporate...
Al-Shabaab, the Islamic insurgency wreaking havoc in Somali, appears to have joined Twitter. The @HSMPress (Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen press office) feed has a trickle of followers and posts...
In the waning days of classes, one of my colleagues asked a student if she’d been among those celebrating outside of the White House the night that President Obama announced the killing of Osama...
Charli highlighted the recently published work of Sean Gourley in Nature on the patter of frequency and magnitude of attacks in insurgencies, so I wanted to cross-post my critique of this work to...
A physicist named Sean Gourley has created a model that he claims explains the power law distribution of deaths in insurgencies across a range of country contexts. Just published in Nature. The abstract is here. Check out his presentation on his original correlational findings from last May: Q&A about his new model here. I'm not sure I understand it well enough to comment, but I figured Duck readers would find it interesting, and I'm asking myself how I can get my hands on his data to look at whether it's broken down by category of victim...
A few months back I wrote a post discussing Sean Gourley's TED talk on the Mathematics of War; specifically, noting that his finding (a power-law distribution of attack frequency and severity in Iraq) was—well—old news. This set off an excellent discussion on Sean's work, my comments, and more generally how the social and hard sciences can clash. More recently, Tom Ricks of The Best Defense blog revisited Sean's talk with his own skepticism, which induced a response from Sean, and further skepticism by Ricks. In defense of his work, Sean responded to Tom's post with the following:With this...
Film #7 "Red Dawn" (1984). We viewed it Tuesday.Readings for Thursday: Hashim. Ahmed S., “Iraq: From Insurgency to Civil War?” 104 Current History, Jan 2005. pp. 10-18. Link requires subscription.Kaplan, Fred, “How Do We Win in Iraq?” Slate, September 9, 2005.Krepinevich, Andrew, “The War In Iraq: The Nature of Insurgency Warfare,” Backgrounder, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, June 2, 2004. Those who have seen it know that "Red Dawn" is not an especially good movie. So why did I select it? Well, I wanted a film that highlights the great difficulty of counterinsurgency warfare...