The mathematics of war

During the Desert Storm, the Gulf war, it was possible to read in the newspapers words such as: “Inmathematical terms, was is becoming more and more electronically controlled and, as a result, it is moving away from the battlefield. Then, when war comes down to earth, it becomes bloody, it loses its mathematical asceticism” Reading the newspapers in those days, one had the impression that modern warfare is based on mathematics, as if it were not men but computers that decided where to carry out “surgical operations”. By contrast, the volume published a few years before the Gulf war conceived as a didactic unit to be used in schools with a guide for the teacher with the titleLa matematica della guerra (The Mathematics of War) published by Gruppo Abele in Turin begins with the words “Mathematics, like any other discipline, lends itself to building several paths towards education for peace”. The volume, written by a group of teachers belonging to an anti-violence organisation forming part of the “education for peace” project, highlights the power or ambiguitiy of mathematical models used to simulate war or conflict situations and demonstrates that in some cases the use of mathematics leads to a better understanding of the situation, but in other cases, the mathematical model itself can lead to conclusions which are either wrong or morally unacceptable.