Abstract
The original version of “Modeling Terrorist Networks” was prepared for a NATO conference in 2003.1 There have been subsequent re-publications, most notably in The Intelligencer,2 and on the London School of Economics website. In those original versions of the paper, we sought to elucidate how the techniques of nonlinear dynamical systems modeling, combined with first principles of counter-intelligence, could be brought to bear on various problems regarding the structure of terrorist networks and the appropriate methods to counter those groups. Because we worked from first principles, many of the insights presented in that original paper remain true today. However, as we began to develop our approach, we noticed almost immediately that there were several constraints on our method, some simply challenging and others just plain awkward.
The wrath of the terrorist is rarely uncontrolled. Contrary to both popular belief and media depiction, most terrorism is neither crazed nor capricious. Rather, terrorist attacks are generally as carefully planned as they are premeditated. Bruce Hoffman, RAND Corporation
The best method to control something is to understand how it works. J. Doyne Farmer, Santa Fe Institute
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- 1.
Fellman et al. [1].
- 2.
Fellman and Wright [2].
- 3.
Fellman and Wright [3].
- 4.
Fellman [4].
- 5.
Flynn et al. [5].
- 6.
Jones [6].
- 7.
Wilson [7].
- 8.
Fellman et al. [8].
- 9.
Kauffman [9].
- 10.
Li and Mills [10].
- 11.
Kauffman [9].
- 12.
Fellman and Wright [11].
- 13.
Richard N. Hass explains this problem rather nicely in terms of the first principles governing the relationship between intelligence, foreign policy, and policy makers, noting that “to be more than the accumulation of responses to separate crises, a successful foreign policy depends upon bridging the intellectual gap between the imperatives of the present and the potential of the future. In turn, this often depends upon bridging the gap between policymakers and the Intelligence Community. After all, as Robert Bowie—a predecessor of mine as Director of the Policy Planning Staff who later served as a deputy director of the CIA—insightfully defines it, “intelligence” is “knowledge and analysis designed to assist action.” Information and insights that do not “assist action” remain lifeless. Successful intelligence, therefore, requires a mutual understanding between policymakers and the Intelligence Community that is all too often lacking. Policymakers need to ensure that the Community is not working in a vacuum, that analysts know what is on our minds and what questions we need answered. At the same time, members of the Intelligence Community have a responsibility to seek out policymakers, understand their concerns, and tell them what they should be paying attention to. It is important to tell policymakers what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”
- 14.
Allison and Zelikow [12].
- 15.
Department of Homeland Security Bioterrorism Risk Assessment: A Call For Change Committee on Methodological Improvements to the Department of Homeland Security’s Biological Agent Risk Analysis, Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, Board on Life Sciences, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council Of The National Academies, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, [13].
- 16.
See Packer [14]. See also Robb, “The Bazaar of Violence in Iraq” http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/07/the_bazaar_of_v.html.
- 17.
See, most recently, Cordesman et al. [15].
- 18.
Ibid., No. 13 and No. 16.
- 19.
Ibid. No. 8.
- 20.
Fellman [16].
- 21.
Fuller [17].
- 22.
Farmer [18].
- 23.
- 24.
Hoffman and Carr [21].
- 25.
For a full description of this process, see Hudson et al. [22] available at:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Sociology-Psychology%20of%20Terrorism.htm.
- 26.
At a basic mathematical level, this kind of phenomenon is explained very clearly by Peters [23]. A more rigorous treatment can be found in “Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks” by Reka Albert and Laszlo Barbási, arXiv:cond-mat/0106096v1 6Jun2001, http://www.nd.edu/~networks/Papers/review.pdf.
- 27.
Here, Farmer is having a bit of a laugh at the expense of his audience. By “simple” systems he means complex, nonlinear systems whose strange attractor is one of sufficiently low dimension that there is an observable phenomenon of closely packed state space and mapping of the phase space with Lyapunov exponents is relatively tractable. A “complex” system in this context would be one with a sparsely populated state space, with bifurcations taking place so frequently that even if there is a strange attractor, the “curse of dimensionality” makes it computationally intractable. The definitive work on the subject is (a) Farmer’s paper [24]. A good representative demonstration of the techniques involved is (b) Shampine and Thompson’s “Solving Delay Differential Equations with dde23” available on the world wide web at http://www.cs.runet.edu/~thompson/webddes/tutorial.html#CITEjdf. (c) Stuart Kauffman also draws on Farmer’s treatment in “The Structure of Rugged Fitness Landscapes”, Chapter 2 of The Origins of Order, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 33–67.
- 28.
Ibid., No. 3.
- 29.
- 30.
Hoffman [28]. In this paper Dr. Hoffman explains a number of factors driving terrorist behavior, from the psychological to the operational. In the psychological sense, he argues, (and we agree with the assessment) that “All terrorists have one trait in common: they live in the future: that distant—yet imperceptibly close—point in time when they will assuredly triumph over their enemies and attain the ultimate realization of their political destiny.’’ (p. 6) As psychological motivation moves into operational capabilities and objectives, terrorist behavior suddenly takes on characteristics which are essentially the same as those which underlie the planning and execution of any covert military, paramilitary, or intelligence operation. In terms of target selection, Hoffman points out that ‘the terrorists’ ability to attract—and moreover, to continue to attract—attention, however is most often predicated on the success of their attacks.” Given their desire for continued success, terrorists of necessity must develop an operational tradecraft which closely resembles that of their opponents. They generally have good intelligence, even exceptionally good intelligence, careful planning, well rehearsed, ergonomic execution, and as Hoffman explains “success for the terrorist is dependent not only on their ability to keep one step ahead of the authorities, but of the counter-terrorist technology curve as well. (p. 11). At this point we are looking at terrorism not at the long-range, socio-cultural level, or even at the mid-range, which is the central focus of our paper, but at the operational level which is about as far removed from Farmer’s social reform model as you can get. Just one example of this kind of operational thinking should help clarify how little likely long-range planning is to be in dealing with terrorist problems. In an investigation involving an unidentified group detonating explosives and destroying commercial property, the investigation was largely handled by a police element of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. One of the dangerous vulnerabilities that had to be corrected in a very rapid and powerful fashion was the fact that the investigators had not considered that the group undertaking the bombings might be monitoring their investigations, including signals traffic, much of which was in clear, unencrypted form. Nobody had thought that if they continued to leave their communications channels open to interception, that exactly in the spirit of staying both one step ahead of the law and one step ahead of the technology, should the investigation get close to providing a solution to the identity of the bombers that their own headquarters might very likely be the next target for a bomb. Add in the exponential increases in computing power, commercial and black market descrambling technologies and this kind of threat falls right into Hoffman’s category of “staying one step ahead of the technology.” Not being social theorists, we cannot professionally comment on the policy aspects of US or Russian governmental behavior with respect to moderating terrorist behavior against their citizens. However, at the operational level, the organization which better manages its compartmentation, which is more adept at either penetrating its adversary’s compartments or forcing its adversaries into a degree of over-compartmentalization that impedes the ability of signals to flow through the network (another form of command decapitation) and which better monitors and interprets its adversary’s communications (coverage) is the one which is vastly more likely to emerge as the winner.
- 31.
Fellman et al. [29].
- 32.
Fellman [16].
- 33.
Fellman [30].
- 34.
In 2004, the President issued a homeland security directive that, along with the National Strategy for Homeland Security published in 2002, mandated assessments of the biological weapons threat to the nation and assigned responsibility for those assessments to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The first such assessment—the Biological Threat Risk Assessment (BTRA) of 2006—is a computer-based tool to assess the risk associated with the release of each of 28 biological threat agents. To assist in its preparation of this version of BTRA as well as the 2008 version, DHS asked the NRC to carry out a study of the methodology used by the agency to prepare BTRA of 2006. This NRC report presents an introduction to the challenge; an analysis of the critical contribution of risk analysis to risk management; a description of the method used to produce the BTRA of 2006, which is the foundation for later assessments; a discussion of risk assessment for unknown and engineered bio-threats; and ways to improve bioterrorism consequence assessment and the BTRA methodology (from “[31]: A Call for Change, Committee on Methodological Improvements to the Department of Homeland Security’s Biological Agent Risk Analysis, National Research Council, ISBN: 0-309-12029-2, 92008) http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12206.html.
- 35.
Parnell et al. [32].
- 36.
Merrick and Parnell [33].
- 37.
Carley et al. [34].
- 38.
Hoffman [35].
- 39.
Clauset and Gleditsch [36].
- 40.
Fellman et al. [37].
- 41.
Ibid. No. 20.
- 42.
Krebs [38].
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
[39], Operational Procedures, Joint Pub 3-053, Joint Doctrine Division, J-7, Joint Staff, Pentagon, Washington, DC (1993).
- 45.
A classic mistake in this area is frequently made when the authors apply neoclassical microeconomic “rational actor” assumptions to modeling terrorism which creates a static, homogenous treatment of opponents and sows more confusion than it resolves. While the rational actor methodology was once extremely popular in economics, it has been generally dismissed by “hard” science and is slowly being replaced by complexity science’s heterogeneous agent-based modeling. Typically, an agent-based model presumes heterogeneous agent composition, preferences, and behaviors and uses the stochastic microagent assumption to replace the rational actor model. For an explanation of agent-based modeling, see Farmer [40].
For applications of agent-based models to terrorism, see Michael Johns and Barry Silverman, “How Emotions and Personality Affect the Utility of Alternative Decisions: A Terrorist Target Selection Case Study” http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~barryg/emotion.pdf, or Ronald A. Woodman, “Agent Based Simulation of Military Operations Other Than War: Small Unit Combat, Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, September, [41] http://diana.gl.nps.navy.mil/~ahbuss/StudentTheses/WoodamanThesis.pdf.
- 46.
- 47.
Stewart [45].
- 48.
Watts [46].
- 49.
See Gerecht [47].
- 50.
- 51.
See Klerks [50].
- 52.
For more detail on this subject see Lissack [51].
- 53.
Moody and White [52].
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Working-Papers/00-08-049.pdf.
- 54.
In terms of strategy, destabilizing this kind of network means pressuring the group to increase its recruitment and raise its connectivity as opposed to the previously discussed strategy of forced over-compartmentation. Induced excess connectivity represents a different kind of complexity overload.
- 55.
The Cohesiveness of Blocks in Social Networks [53].
- 56.
The concept of cohesion is formalized through the use of graph theory. The graph is defined that the vertices represent the set of individuals in the network, and the edges are the relations among actors defined as paired sets. The subsets of nodes that link non-adjacent vertices will disconnect actors if removed. Any such set of nodes is called an (i, j) cut-set if every path connecting i and j passes through at least one node of the set. The “cut-set resistance to being pulled apart” criterion and the multiple independent paths “held together” criterion of cohesion are formally equivalent in this formal specification. This kind of graph, if constructed with complete information, also provides a predictive mechanism for exactly which nodes need to be removed in order to remove the possibility of signals propagating through the system.
- 57.
Ibid. No. 36.
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Fellman, P.V. (2015). Modeling Terrorist Networks: The Second Decade. In: Fellman, P., Bar-Yam, Y., Minai, A. (eds) Conflict and Complexity. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1705-1_1
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