Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
Hi Bill,
Thanks for bringing up some great points on what Ken rightly termed "an odd thread".

I'd agree. Vin diagrams (or any model) are limited in their ability to establishing proportionality - people have to do that based on assessment of the conditions. I think it (the proportionality of one over the other) could stay anywhere within those circles for a number of reasons. I now understand where GS was going when he voiced his concern about one evolving or devolving into another.

I think that is one of the reasons its critical to evaluate the conditions and look at the context in which the fighting is taking place.
Rob,
The real problem I see with using Venn diagrams in this analysis has to do with the fact that you do not get all the dimensionality you need. For example, you cannot use them to measure how intensely a given member of the IW group is committed to the cause. The Venn diagram is also, at best, only a momentary snapshot in time which cannot show the status of events which may, or may not, be in a stasis of time.

Here's a little explanation of this last. The American Revolution did not start with Lexington and Concord; there were "closet" rebels in place for quite some time before that happened. Things like the Connecticut Charter Oak Incident of 1687 and the 1773 Boston Tea Party, IMO, are examples. And the "conventional phase" of the Revolution may have been delayed much longer had the British not really preciptated actions at Bunker/Breed's Hill. I submit that a large portion of the campaigns around NYC (Battle of Long Island or the Battle of Stony Point for example) were much more examples of irregular than regular war (at least from the British point of view of how the battles played out)--even Trenton strikes me as a guerrilla raid, not a conventional pitched battle. 1st/2d Saratoga (Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights) and some of the later (1780s) battles in the Carolinas (Cowpens particularly) were more like 18th C. conventional war. Interestingly enough, I think conventional war came in the Revolution largely after the French ( a regular force) allied with the rebels (largely an irregular force despite von Steuben's hard work) .

Back to the main point--to do an adequate modeling of the interrelationships, I suspect we need something like at least 3 or 4 dimensional Cartesian coordinate axes--not only an X and a Y axis, but also a Z and a Z' axis too.

But, mathematical models are probably the wrong way to go entirely for explaining this very human activity called conflict.