Disrupting terrorist and criminal networks: Crime script analysis through dodaf applications

Abstract

The complexity of the current threat landscape associated with terrorism and criminal networks continues to be a top national and global security agenda item. With heightened awareness and concern regarding the proliferation and expansion of ISIL and connections to homegrown violent extremism, understanding the network structure and functional perspectives is a key enabler to supporting counter terrorism disruption strategies. Challenges associated with understanding these ‘dark networks’ stems both from contextualizing the information (plagued by uncertainty and ambiguity) and from the multiplex nature of the actors whereby they can share more than one type of relation. In this exploratory work, Counter-Terrorism Architectural Frameworks (CTAF) is introduced as an application of the Department of Defense Architectural Frameworks (DODAF) to support ‘opening the blackbox’ of terrorist activities to identify terrorist network vulnerabilities and to develop disruption strategies. The multiple views afforded by the application of DODAF provides a more comprehensive picture to support decision making and can highlight the complex organizational dynamics that are not readily observable through Social Network Analysis (SNA) alone. In this chapter the methodology is explained and applied to an analysis of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist network (Subrahmanian et al. in Computational analysis of terrorist groups: Lashkar-e-Taiba. Springer, Berlin, 2013) and the Noordin Top terrorist network (Roberts and Everton in J Soc Struct 12(2), 2011).