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) ]

Disrupting Terrorist Networks, a dynamic fitness landscape approach

Apply the principles of computer/network security. Can your democracy tolerate the false alarms that are the price for zero tolerance of missed detections?

Although much political capital has been made regarding the war on terrorism, and while appropriations have gotten underway, there has been a dearth of deep work on counter-terrorism, and despite massive efforts by the federal government, most cities and states do not have a robust response system.

In fact, most do not yet have a robust audit system with which to evaluate their vulnerabilities or their responses. At the federal level there remain many unresolved problems of coordination. One reason for this is the shift of much of federal spending on war-fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. While this approach has drawn deep and lasting criticism, it is, in fact, in accord with many principles of both military and corporate strategy.

In the following paper we explore several models of terrorist networks and the implications of both the models and their substantive conclusions for combating terrorism.

The Symmetries and Redundancies of Terror: Patterns in the Dark

Six years after 9/11 , US intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major "gap" in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters.

In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel "czar" Mike McConnell has argued that the nation's spook community is "missing a significant portion of what we should be getting" from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots.

Remember:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Now, back to that news story:

Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told NEWSWEEK she has learned of "specific cases where US lives have been put at risk" as a result.

Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

See also:

McConnell told Congress that we are "significantly burdened in capturing overseas communications of foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside the United States."

Critics of the administration have expressed reluctance about expanding the surveillance powers of the government.

Midday Saturday, the White House re-released the text of the president's address, removing the sentence: "Every day that Congress puts off these reforms increases the danger to our Nation."

An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing

As violent Islamic extremists take their message to the Internet with remarkable skill, military academics are mulling new ways to challenge them in cyberspace.

DOD seeks ways to fight online propaganda war

Citing a "period of heightened threat" to the US homeland, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell asked Congress to "act immediately" to make changes in current law to permit the interception of messages between terrorist targets overseas, which he said now requires burdensome court orders.

Agency Seeks Greater Surveillance Power Overseas

The day after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, a Saudi woman resident in London, a member of a wealthy family, rang her sister in Riyadh to discuss the crisis affecting the kingdom. Her niece answered the phone.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s here, dearest aunt, and I’ll get her in a minute, but is that all you have to say to me? No congratulations for yesterday?’

The dearest aunt, out of the country for far too long, was taken aback. She should not have been. The fervour that didn’t dare show itself in public was strong even at the upper levels of Saudi society. US intelligence agencies engaged in routine surveillance were, to their immense surprise, picking up unguarded cellphone talk in which excited Saudi princelings were heard revelling in bin Laden’s latest caper. Like the CIA, they had not thought it possible for him to reach such heights.

In Princes’ Pockets

That is how war works: It degrades every part of you, and your sense of humor is no exception.

I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America--providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle's tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver's hatch. One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book. The second kill was a straight shot: A dog that was lying in the street and bathing in the sun didn't have enough time to get up and run away from the speeding Bradley. Its front half was completely severed from its rear, which was twitching wildly, and its head was still raised and smiling at the sun as if nothing had happened at all.

I didn't see the third kill, but I heard about it over the radio. Everyone was laughing, nearly rolling with laughter. I approached the private after the mission and asked him about it.

"So, you killed a few dogs today," I said skeptically.

"Hell yeah, I did. It's like hunting in Iraq!" he said, shaking with laughter.

"Did you run over dogs before the war, back in Indiana?" I asked him.

"No," he replied, and looked at me curiously. Almost as if the question itself was in poor taste.

Shock Troops

My Sunday samplers are immune to recommendation, but if you saw Part III this week ...

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

"They brought him in one day and brought his head in another."

... then you might be interested in this article. (I haven't read it yet.)

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

"It hasn’t worked for Pakistan," said Frances Fragos Townsend, who heads the Homeland Security Council at the White House. "It hasn’t worked for the United States."

Still, Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state, described General Musharraf as America’s best bet.

But some new American measures might have to remain secret to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf.

"It has to be dealt with. If he can deal with it, amen. But if he can’t, he’s got to build and borrow the capability."

That's quite a nice euphemism you've got, there.

Bush Aides See Failure in Fight With Al Qaeda in Pakistan

A previously unseen 50-second clip of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden appeared July 14 as part of a new video released by As-Sahab media. The bin Laden segment, however, appears to have been taped at the same time as another video of him released in May 2002. Al Qaeda has little to gain by keeping bin Laden under wraps -- which suggests something is up.

Hrm.

Al Qaeda's Weak Attempt to Parade Osama bin Laden