Predictions of War Duration

Glenn McRae ()
Additional contact information
Glenn McRae: Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

Stats, 2025, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-9

Abstract: The durations of wars fought between 1480 and 1941 A.D. were found to be well represented by random numbers chosen from a single-event Poisson distribution with a half-life of (1.25 ± 0.1) years. This result complements the work of L.F. Richardson who found that the frequency of outbreaks of wars can be described as a Poisson process. This result suggests that a quick return on investment requires a distillation of the many stressors of the day, each one of which has a small probability of being included in a convincing well-orchestrated simple call-to-arms. The half-life is a measure of how this call wanes with time.

Keywords: war duration; Poisson process; physics of war; half-life; social complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C10 C11 C14 C15 C16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-905X/8/4/92/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-905X/8/4/92/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jstats:v:8:y:2025:i:4:p:92-:d:1767013

Access Statistics for this article

Stats is currently edited by Mrs. Minnie Li

More articles in Stats from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().