Over a period of approximately five years, Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School and Daniel Levinthal of the Wharton School have been working on a detailed simulation (producing approximately a million fitness landscape graphs) in order to determine optimal patterns of decision-making for corporations. In 2006, we adapted this study, combining it with our own work on terrorism to examine what would happen if we inverted Ghemawat and Levinthal's findings and sought to provide disinformation or otherwise interfere with the communications and decision processes of terrorist organizations in order to optimize poor decision making and inefficiencies in organizational coordination, command and control.

The bulk of this study was then presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the North American Association for Computation in the Social and Organizational Sciences. We present here an updated version of that study, emphasizing the rather counter-intuitive finding that "soft" targets have almost no value and that unless one can influence key factors, an effort directed at the easy to reach elements of terrorist organizations may actually be worse than mounting no effort at all.

We conclude with the recommendation that some fundamental rethinking may be required if the United States is to effectively defend itself from future terrorist attacks.

Here are links to a few of the author's other papers:

Why the World Isn’t Flat

Globalization has bound people, countries, and markets closer than ever, rendering national borders relics of a bygone era—or so we’re told. But a close look at the data reveals a world that’s just a fraction as integrated as the one we thought we knew. In fact, more than 90 percent of all phone calls, Web traffic, and investment is local. What’s more, even this small level of globalization could still slip away.

The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change

Discussions of technological change have offered sharply contrasting perspectives of technological change as gradual or incremental and the image of technological change as being rapid, even discontinuous. These alternative perspectives are bridged using the punctuated equilibrium framework of evolutionary biology. Using this framework, it is argued that the critical event is not a transformation of the technology, but speciation—the application of existing technology to a new domain of application. As a result of the distinct selection criteria and the degree of resource abundance in the new domain, a... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]