Optimizing Department of Homeland Security Defense Investments: Applying Defender‐Attacker (‐Defender) Optimization to Terror Risk Assessment and Mitigation
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Authors
Brown, Gerald G.
Carlyle, W. Matthew
Wood, R. Kevin
Subjects
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Advisors
Date of Issue
2008
Date
Publisher
National Academies Press
Language
Abstract
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is investing billions of dollars to protect us from terrorist attacks and their expected damage (i.e., risk). We present prescriptive optimization models to guide these investments. Our primary goal is to recommend investments in a set of available defense options; each of these options can reduce our vulnerability to terrorist attack, or enable future mitigation actions for particular types of attack. Our models prescribe investments that minimize the maximum risk (i.e., expected damage) to which we are exposed. Our “Defend-Attack-Mitigate risk-minimization model” assumes that terrorist attackers will observe, and react to, any strategic defense investment on the scale required to protect our entire country. We also develop a more general tri-level “Defender-Attacker- Defender risk-minimization model” in which (a) the defender invests strategically in interdiction and/or mitigation options (for example, by inoculating health-care workers, or stockpiling a mix of emergency vaccines) (b) the attacker observes those investments and attacks as effectively as possible, and (c) the defender then optimally deploys the mitigation options that his investments have enabled. We show with simple numerical examples some of the important insights offered by such analysis. As a byproduct of our analysis we elicit the optimal attacker behavior that would follow our chosen defensive investment, and therefore we can focus intelligence collection on telltales of the most-likely and most-lethal attacks.
Type
Article
Description
Appendix E in Department of Homeland Security Bioterrorist Risk Assessment: A Call for Change, National Research Council report, National Academies Press, Washington, DC.
Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID) Paper.
Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID) Paper.
Series/Report No
Department
Operations Research (OR)
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NPS Report Number
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Funding
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Citation
Brown, G., Carlyle, M., and Wood, K., 2008, “Optimizing Department of Homeland Security Defense Investments: Applying Defender‐Attacker (‐Defender) Optimization to Terror Risk Assessment and Mitigation,” Appendix E in Department of Homeland Security Bioterrorist Risk Assessment: A Call for Change, National Research Council report, National Academies Press, Washington, DC.
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.