The September 11 Attack: A Percolation of Individual Passive Support

TL;DR

This paper models terrorism support as a percolation process, showing that the 9/11 attack resulted from a global spread of passive supporters, and argues that intelligence gathering alone could not have predicted this transition.

Contribution

It introduces a percolation-based model for terrorism support, highlighting the global spread of passive supporters and analyzing the limitations of intelligence in predicting such events.

Findings

Passive supporter backbones can become globally connected.

World percolation of dormant supporters can lead to large-scale terrorist events.

Intelligence gathering alone is insufficient to predict such transitions.

Abstract

A model for terrorism is presented using the theory of percolation. Terrorism power is related to the spontaneous formation of random backbones of people who are sympathetic to terrorism but without being directly involved in it. They just don't oppose in case they could. In the past such friendly-to-terrorism backbones have been always existing but were of finite size and localized to a given geographical area. The September 11 terrorist attack on the US has revealed for the first time the existence of a world wide spread extension. It is argued to have result from a sudden world percolation of otherwise unconnected and dormant world spread backbones of passive supporters. The associated strategic question is then to determine if collecting ground information could have predict and thus avoid such a transition. Our results show the answer is no, voiding the major criticism against intelligence services. To conclude the impact of military action is discussed.