TED Talk "Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war "

A good friend of mine recently posted this talk on his Facebook feed and I simply found the power of looking at the data brought to bear by this group of physicists on the complex problem of war and insurgency strategy really fascinating.

I would say the graph shown at the end where he plots "alpha" over time for the Iraq War the proverbial "punchline" to the true power of showing that what they have modeled here has some actual real world value.