Rising conflict across several regions has revived an old question in strategy. Military planning often assumes direct cause-and-effect. Leaders remove a ruler, defeat an army, or destroy command centers. Stability then returns. Evidence from recent conflicts shows a different pattern. Small disruptions sometimes trigger large cascades of instability.
Sometimes, killing the leader sometimes makes the war worse. Not metaphorically. Mathematically.
Dr. Rolando Zubiran examined this pattern through a three-part Substack series titled The DNA of Chaos, The Aftermath of Chaos, and Calculating Chaos. His analysis draws on research first published by physicist Sean Gourley in the journal Nature. Gourley studied insurgencies across several countries and found a consistent statistical pattern. The frequency of attacks compared with their severity followed a power law curve. The slope of that curve, known as alpha, described how organized or fragmented a conflict had become.
Zubiran argues that the same logic explains several current geopolitical crises. Modern conflicts behave like complex systems rather than predictable campaigns. Political orders fracture when central authority disappears, and violence then reorganizes across competing groups. Understanding that structure offers a way to interpret events that often appear chaotic.
The Formula
Gourley’s research examined thousands of conflict events across Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and other war zones. Each attack was coded by casualties and plotted on a log scale. The resulting pattern formed a straight statistical line. Conflicts with many small attacks and fewer large ones followed a slope near alpha equal to 2.5. According to the research, such a distribution signals an equilibrium where insurgent networks adapt to sustain violence over long periods.
Traditional military strategy assumes hierarchical enemies. Remove leadership and the structure collapses. Zubiran’s analysis shows that patronage-based systems behave differently. Drug cartels, authoritarian regimes, and militia networks often depend on a single apex authority who distributes resources and arbitrates disputes. Removal of that apex rarely ends violence. Fragmentation occurs instead.
Mexico’s campaign against cartel leadership after 2006 illustrates the pattern. Authorities captured or killed most senior cartel figures within several years. Violence increased rather than declined. Smaller groups fought for territory and revenue streams. Homicide rates tripled during the following period. Gourley’s model interprets such outcomes through a rising alpha value, which signals fragmentation across many smaller actors.
Zubiran served as Minister of Economy for Nuevo León, Mexico’s industrial capital, during these years. He watched the fragmentation unfold not from a think tank but from inside the government, seeing how violence migrated from highways to neighborhoods, how a theory that looked clean on paper produced chaos on the streets. That firsthand experience shapes how he reads the same dynamics playing out now at the geopolitical level.
Zubiran applies the same framework to modern geopolitical crises. Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, and tensions surrounding Taiwan illustrate different positions along the fragmentation spectrum. Venezuela represents a system whose central authority was removed. Ukraine reflects a conflict locked near statistical equilibrium. Iran is showing signals of approaching instability. Taiwan remains a potential conflict whose structure has yet to appear in data.
Each case reveals how structural organization influences the trajectory of violence. Political systems with overlapping security institutions and competing chains of command may resist coups. That same design, however, increases the risk of fragmentation once leadership disappears.
The Aftermath Of Chaos
Events following regime collapse illustrate the second stage of Zubiran’s argument. Removing a ruler often solves the tactical problem while creating a strategic one. Networks that once relied on a central authority reorganize into rival factions. Violence spreads across new locations and actors.
Examples appear repeatedly in modern history. Iraq after 2003 entered a prolonged insurgency despite rapid military victory. Libya has lacked unified governance since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Zubiran argues that these outcomes reflect the same structural dynamic observed in cartel fragmentation.
The same design that made the regime resilient makes its collapse dangerous. Remove the apex and you don’t merely decapitate a government. You sever the node that held a patronage network in precarious equilibrium. Local commanders with weapons and resources have strong incentives to entrench themselves as autonomous power brokers rather than submit to a successor. Venezuela’s economy contracted roughly 80% over the past decade. There isn’t much patronage left to distribute, which means whoever tries to hold the pyramid together has very little to offer.
Zubiran calls this the cartel effect. Leadership removal fragments patronage networks. Smaller actors compete for authority, which often increases the total amount of violence even as individual attacks become smaller in scale.
Iran: The Pre-Insurgency Signal
Iran is the most analytically urgent case in Zubiran’s framework , not because its leadership has fallen, but because the system may be approaching the threshold where it could.
Iran’s security architecture shares a structural feature with Venezuela’s: deliberate institutional fragmentation for regime survival. The IRGC, the Basij militia, the intelligence ministry, and the regular military operate as parallel power centers with separate chains of command and separate funding streams. This design has historically made the regime resilient, no single defection can topple it. But that same fragmentation becomes a liability when the system comes under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.
Zubiran’s framework makes a pointed prediction about external military pressure in this environment. Strikes on Iran now would not suppress instability. They would accelerate the phase transition toward uncontrolled fragmentation. The system is near a tipping point where external perturbation wouldn’t rally support around the regime, as in past crises, but shatter it. The IRGC alone contains multiple power centers, any one of which could become a rival fiefdom in a fractured state. Post-2003 Iraq. Post-2011 Libya. Those are the structural comparisons that matter.
The regime is holding the lid on a pot approaching a temperature where the lid becomes the problem.
Calculating Chaos
The third essay in the series asks whether structured analysis can still find patterns inside chaotic conflicts. Gourley’s framework offers one method. Statistical distributions reveal how armed groups organize themselves even when events appear unpredictable.
Zubiran extends the framework to infrastructure warfare and economic pressure. Modern conflict extends beyond traditional military objectives. Infrastructure, financial networks, shipping routes, and information systems all influence the organizational structure of violence , and their disruption raises fragmentation pressures within societies.
Economic consequences reinforce the same pattern. Energy markets respond quickly to disruptions in strategic chokepoints. Insurance premiums for shipping increase. Supply chains shift. Rising uncertainty spreads across financial systems that rely on stable trade routes. China faces particular exposure here: a large portion of its imported oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz. Strategic reserves offer temporary relief, but prolonged disruption imposes economic strain whose downstream effects are difficult to contain.
Zubiran argues that such patterns reveal structural constraints on geopolitical outcomes. Mathematical models can’t predict the exact timing of events. They identify trajectories. Rising fragmentation signals prolonged instability. Consolidation signals the possibility of negotiation or settlement.
Strategic Implications
Strategic miscalculation often arises when leaders treat conflicts as linear contests. Military success against a leadership structure may produce long periods of instability if the underlying system fragments. Zubiran’s analysis suggests that modern conflicts operate inside complex systems whose behavior resembles patterns studied in physics and network theory.
Recognition of those patterns may improve policy decisions. Military action that removes central authority requires preparation for the organizational aftermath. Economic disruptions that fragment societies produce unintended consequences across regions. And interventions designed to stabilize can, if they misread the structural moment, do precisely the opposite.
Three essays from Dr. Rolando Zubiran therefore present a single argument. Violence reorganizes according to structural dynamics rather than political intentions. Mathematical models reveal those dynamics through statistical patterns that recur across conflicts, across decades, across the full range of political systems.
Tactical victories occur quickly. Regime change does not.
Dr. Rolando Zubirán Robert is a geotechnology and economics expert at Singularity University and former Minister of Economy of Nuevo León, Mexico. His series The DNA of Chaos, The Aftermath of Chaos, and Calculating Chaosis published on Substack at Shifting Narratives and on X on his account @rzubiran.
