Disrupting Terrorist Networks: A Dynamic Fitness Landscape Approach

Abstract

Over a period of approximately 5 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.