Abstract : A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two qualities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of the event, the frequency is said to follow the power law. Further investigation of this phenomenon has shown that certain casualty rates during a stable phase of an irregular war seem to also follow approximate power law distributions. If there is enough evidence that this phenomenon is true, then it may be possible to develop a metric to describe the stability of an irregular war. For our case we will take a given violence distribution and see how close that distribution is to the power law. The coefficient of determination will provide the metric and the closer it is to one, the more stable the violence.