1 WORKING PAPER Testing Cederman: Relative capability as the missing link in modeling and projecting conflict-intensity patterns by Matthew M. Felice Florida International University Miami, Florida Presented 9 October 2015 at ISSS-ISAC Joint Annual Conference, Springfield, Massachusetts Abstract In 2003 Lars-Erik Cederman bridged a decades-long gap in the study of war by resuming Lewis Fry Richardson’s early-20th century exploration of the power-law distribution of conflict intensity. In 2011 he took it up a notch by “Testing Clausewitz” and finding compelling historical evidence that this intensity pattern can shift, and has shifted, in response to major political change. The implications are serious: War intensity appears to be deterministic, yet is responsive to system-level transformation. There is an implied challenge to test and further develop the causal theories that might explain both the regularity of war and its susceptibility to long-term change. Cross-disciplinary researchers such as Neil F. Johnson already have been doing just that. Like Cederman, they offer process models that accurately describe, but still do not completely explain, the observed patterns and shifts. This paper further investigates the causal problem by narrowing it down to the question of relative capability or national power. It uses power itself as the missing link in existing process models, and retests the larger claims about the possibility of system-level change in conflict intensity. Matt Felice is a strategic planner for United States Southern Command. The contents of this paper do not reflect the positions of the United States Government.