Homeland Security

DecisionPath's Counter-Terrorism Preparedness solution helps homeland security authorities plan, validate, and execute strategies for preventing and/or responding to terrorist attack threats.

Challenge: Preparedness and On-The-Fly Planning to Stop Terrorists

Improved counter-terrorism intelligence is helping Homeland Security authorities identify credible attack threats more effectively. However, this progress highlights critical “downstream” problems for decision-makers:

  • Modeling credible, but imprecisely defined threats
  • Formulating alternative plans to prevent, recover from and respond to terrorist attacks
  • Validating plans by assessing and comparing their likely impacts, both short- and long-term
  • Selecting and adapting plan templates on-the-fly, as situations evolve
  • Building and exploiting an institutional memory of expertise and decision processes in prior crises.

Problem: Counter-Terrorism Is More Than a Numbers Exercise
Conventional decision support tools lack the horsepower required to address these needs effectively. Spreadsheets and other simulators excel at manipulating numerical data, projecting quantitative trends, and the like. However, they fall short in modeling and reasoning about qualitative factors and interactions; uncertain and rapidly changing information; and disruptive events. Capturing and leveraging expert knowledge about terrorist behavior patterns and domestic vulnerabilities is problematic. Disaster exercises are valuable learning tools, but they are difficult and costly to conduct, so they are staged infrequently.

Our Solution Approach: Test-Drive Plans To Deal With Attack Threats
For example, Homeland Security must prepare for terrorist attacks using biochemical agents. Initial preparedness involves generalized planning rather than responding to a specific crisis. HomeSec allows authorities to depict various hypothetical attack threats, against both single and multiple targets. For example, analysts could use HomeSec to construct a Scenario in which intelligence accumulates that points to an imminent biochemical attacks against two East Coast cities, launched by terrorists already in place in the US.

Given such a threat context, officials might define various plans to: identify and capture the terrorists; heighten security around water supplies, food delivery systems, and public sites; stockpile vaccines and antibiotics at metropolitan distribution centers; ensure healthcare and civil defense readiness to carry
out quarantines, inoculations, interdictions, and so forth. Each distinct combination of plan elements would be combined with the shared backdrop of the assumed attack threat to create a new Scenario.

Analysts would then use ForeTell HomeSec's simulation and analysis tools to explore:

  • The potential effectiveness of various defensive strategies to prevent or blunt diverse attack threats
  • The strengths and weaknesses of alternative plans to recover from successful attacks

For the hypothetical biochemical attack, Homeland Security experts might assess the effectiveness
of a particular defensive measure by analyzing the detailed log of its corresponding Scenario. Alternatively, experts could compare that plan against other strategies by analyzing details of outcomes across the relevant Scenarios. Effectiveness is measured in terms of the plan’s success in preventing the attack and capturing the instigators. If the simulated attack did take place, effectiveness might be measured using metrics such as containment, minimized loss of life, injuries, and psychological trauma, economic cost, etc.

Model Quickly and Easily with Pre-Made Building Blocks
HomeSec provides a library of pre-defined components for building models quickly, including:
infrastructure targets; terrorist organizations; threats and attack means; population centers; security authorities; preparedness strategies; and potential events. These elements can be defined manually or imported via SQL interfaces to Government databases or by loading data files in XML or CSV exchange formats. ForeTell also interfaces to a Geographical Information System (GIS), enabling HomeSec to project changes in intelligence, attacks, and authorities' responses to a map during simulations.

Capture the "Physics" of Counter-Terrorism
DecisionPath developed ForeTell HomeSec based on Silent Vector, a role-playing simulation exercise conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and ANSER, two Washington DC "think tanks". These exercises employ retired Government officials to play leadership roles (e.g. the President, National Security Council members) and apply current policies against plausible threat scenarios. The goal is to uncover how those policies might perform in the real world and refine them in advance of actual crises. The Director of Homeland Security at CSIS supplied DecisionPath with a "lessons learned" briefing from Silent Vector. He requested us to apply ForeTell to project the full range of consequences of proposed counter-terrorism strategies, all the while anticipating potential terrorist responses to those strategies. Consequences include economic, social, and political consequences, at local, national, and international levels, over short- and long-term time frames. Existing tools were unable to capture and project the diverse kinds of knowledge - uncertainties, terrorist behavior patterns, socio-political dynamics, etc - that typify homeland security threats.