Shaping Operations to Attack Robust Terror Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to weaken terrorist networks by strategically removing nodes to increase their centrality, thereby reducing their ability to regenerate leadership after disruption.

Contribution

It introduces a novel shaping operation framework, formalizes the problem, proves its NP-Completeness, and provides an efficient heuristic for real-world application.

Findings

Removing 12% of nodes increases network centrality by 17-45%

The heuristic scales to networks with over 1,000 nodes

The approach effectively disrupts network resilience

Abstract

Security organizations often attempt to disrupt terror or insurgent networks by targeting "high value targets" (HVT's). However, there have been numerous examples that illustrate how such networks are able to quickly re-generate leadership after such an operation. Here, we introduce the notion of a "shaping" operation in which the terrorist network is first targeted for the purpose of reducing its leadership re-generation ability before targeting HVT's. We look to conduct shaping by maximizing the network-wide degree centrality through node removal. We formally define this problem and prove solving it is NP-Complete. We introduce a mixed integer-linear program that solves this problem exactly as well as a greedy heuristic for more practical use. We implement the greedy heuristic and found in examining five real-world terrorist networks that removing only 12% of nodes can increase the network-wide centrality between 17% and 45%. We also show our algorithm can scale to large social networks of 1,133 nodes and 5,541 edges on commodity hardware.