i didn't really watch the video, but it appears he is just doing a statistical analyses, and finds something like a power law.   this type of thing has been done before and power laws are so ubiquitous its like finding that some phenomena occurs in space and time---eureka!!!  i was aquainted with one person who did some nice math and who also got defense grants for modeling conflict, and he had his own more interesting if puzzling law (based on something like entropy).  

i prefer the approaches which follow that of lewis fry richardson (statistics of deadly quarrels) , because they are mechanistic (ecological) as opposed to empirical, though its possible war is even more difficult to predict than the stock market or the fate of the universe, which in contrast are fairly simple problems.  

--- On Thu, 5/14/09, Bob Broedel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Bob Broedel <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: math model of war
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Thursday, May 14, 2009, 8:42 AM
> I would love to hear the opinion of
> SftP folk about this
> video. It is fairly brief.
> 
> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/physicists-fool-proof-war-forumla-just-add-media-accounts/
> 
> Bob Broedel in Tallahassee.
>