Self-Organized Terrorist-Counterterrorist Adaptive Coevolutions, Part 1: A Conceptual Design

This paper---the first of a projected series of papers---examines the proposition that terrorist networks, such as Al Qaeda, are complex adaptive systems; that is, they consist of widely dispersed, autonomous cells that obey a decentralized command and control hierarchy; their mission operatives are...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ilachinski, Andrew
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
AL-QAEDA
COMPLEX NETWORKS
COUNTERTERRORISM
DYNAMIC NETWORKS
DYNAMICS
GRAPHS
MATHEMATICAL REPRESENTATIONS
SEMIOTIC AGENTS
SOTCAC (SELF-ORGANIZED TERRORIST-COUNTERTERRORIST ADAPTIVE COEVOLUTIONS)
TERRORIST NETWORKS
TERRORISTS
Theoretical Mathematics
Unconventional Warfare
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Summary:This paper---the first of a projected series of papers---examines the proposition that terrorist networks, such as Al Qaeda, are complex adaptive systems; that is, they consist of widely dispersed, autonomous cells that obey a decentralized command and control hierarchy; their mission operatives are highly adaptive and mobile; their cells are strongly compartmentalized, structurally robust, and largely impervious to (unfocused) local attack; and, though the networks, as a whole, are typically covert and amorphous, they can also rapidly coalesce into tightly organized local swarms. This implies that, in principle, terrorist networks, as dynamical systems, ought to be amenable to the same methodological course of study as any other complex adaptive system (such as a natural ecology, a biological immune system, or the human brain). In particular, fundamental insights into the behavior of terrorist networks including an understanding of how they form, how they evolve, how they adapt (to changing internal and external contexts), and what their innate strengths and vulnerabilities are may be gleaned by studying the patterns that emerge from a multiagent-based simulation of their dynamics. This paper has two primary goals: (1) to review existing analytical and modeling tools that are applicable to the study of dynamic networks (including mathematical graph theory, social network modeling, complex network theory, graph visualization, and multiagent-based modeling), and outline how these tools may be leveraged to help understand the dynamics of terrorist networks, and (2) to introduce the conceptual design of a new multiagent-based toolkit, called SOTCAC (Self-Organized Terrorist-Counterterrorist Adaptive Coevolutions). SOTCAC uses autonomous, intelligent agents to represent the components of coevolving terrorist and counterterrorist networks.