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Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats
The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War:
"Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."
As lame as it sounds, it would be a step up from the current method my gov't(US) uses: treat everybody like a criminal.
But the terrorists have to conform to reality, there are conditions that must be met for an attack to be carried out. Resources and weaponry must be aquired transferred or built. Willing persons must be in the area or transported there. The application of these resources, which are valuable even if they are a disposable one-shot sort deal often, so we know they will be trying to maximize effect in minimizing risk. There may be vastly more targets than terrorists, but that does not mean that every target could be targeted at any one time. If anything, the research should be a useful tool in helping predict not randomized attacks, but rather supplies, logistics, idelogical supports; the true treasures of information warfare.
Demented But Determined.
And some targets are preferable to others. So empty warehouse X isn't as interesting as a shopping mall. So the randomness must fall with certain ranges of targets that will cause terror. Pattern analysis may help figure out what targets they pick randomly from based upon the above mentioned logistic, supply and idealogical concerns.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
Right, and of course the next question is "what's to stop the terrorists from doing the same analysis, and the making it a point to do something other than
what the model predicts?" Now that it's public knowledge that we are using this kind of analysis, wouldn't it be useless?
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
The people of Iraq have a right to resist their occupiers by any means necessary. If a government with a century-long history of aggression and crushing democracies were to invade your country, I'm sure you'd agree. That anyone would develop technology to aid the occupiers is shameful. If anything, try to come up with a computer model for ending the war and imprisoning its architects and enablers.
I love the terrorist-fearing pant-loads crying that the terrorists use women and children to fight off the people who have invaded and occupied their country. Do they really think American women and children wouldn't volunteer to help resist the Chinese, if they entered our nation and set up a puppet government?
All I can say about this conflict is that nobody I give a shit about was stupid enough to believe the government's lies and enlist to fight in Iraq. My deepest condolences for those who enlisted pre-2003 to defend their nation...these men and women are being misused.
Blar.
I have a fool-proof method for completely avoiding any future attacks upon our troops in Iraq. Get the fuck out of Iraq. Stop invading countries for the purpose of lining the pockets of defense contractors and protecting the interests of oil tycoons and central bankers. Predictable idiotic responses to my idea: the terrorists will have won! The terrorists have already won a new recruiting and breeding ground, thanks to gw, cheney and rumsfeld. Iran will take over Iraq: let them have it. they're probably too smart to want the trouble though. there will be civil war and genocide. we already have that, pay more attention. we'll destabilize the middle east. we already did that.
Well, unfortunately the guys placing the artillery are not necessarily the ones who live there, and the ones who do live there will get a gun pointed at their family if they ask for it to be moved.
Which is not to say that civilians getting caught in the middle between two warring sides is anything new or novel, but the least we could do is not try to dismiss it by implying they deserve to get killed.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Then terrorists will start rolling dice. They aren't idiots, and they have a bigger stake in this then we do.
...on why the USA is so hated that there have been TWELVE THOUSAND terrorist attacks in three and a half years?
Or is that just crazy defeatist talk?
They do. All the time.
Prediction: The earth is warming due to man made effects.
Test: Take given data (earth warming) and attempt to sort out all possible other effects.
These models are EXCEEDINGLY complicated. The early ones were pretty damn complicated but were basic by comparison. Models suggested for years that climate change was man made without a doubt. Later, models were revised with the addition of new data and new processes. this means that NEW information was found that NO ONE had before, like the actual oxygen content in ice cores. Like the feedback nature of ocean currents. Those were taken into account and the model changed. We became less sure of the impact of man in the scheme. As the models grew more sophisicated the confidence intervals got better and more information was added. We are now MUCH, MUCH more sure that climate change is real, man made and will impact us in a significant fashion.
All we have left are people like you. People who claim that their rejection of climate change is based on some scientific principle, like they are galileo before the church. I've got news for you. It's isn't some religious theocracy. It isn't an unscientific crusade. It is just science that leads to an unfortunate conclusion. We don't WANT to have this conclusion. We don't WANT to come to the conclusion that life will get demonstrably worse in the next 100 years rather than better. We don't WANT to live on a warming planet. These are just conclusions from the model and evidenced by the world around us.
I have no knowledge of why you don't get this or don't want to get this. All I can say is I'm sorry for you.
The big pattern is that the guerrillas fight dirty. They look for and use any openings: if you close one opening, they'll use the next, least defended one, and it takes them very little time to shift targets because they have little command structure, just enough to keep isolated cells in munitions and shelter.
The second big pattern is "why do they keep attacking"? If the US instigators of this war had listened to their more competent staff, who told them it's a huge mess and they needed 3 times the number of troops and not to use so many mercenaries (who are a massive problem in Iraq as they've been in other "peacekeeping" operatons), we'd have had a much cleaner recovery after the invasion and wouldn't have these issues.
But that's an even bigger picture pattern, and these research studies can do nothing about it.