The Mathematics of Terrorism Risk: Equilibrium Force Allocations and Attack Probabilities (original) (raw)

We model the struggle between terrorist and conventional forces as a Colonel Blotto game, replacing Powers and Shen’s (2006) mathematical expression for the probability of target destruction by a more rigorously derived approximation from a diffusion-based Lanchester analysis. We then use the resulting equilibrium solutions for force allocations and attack probabilities to make inferences about terrorist attackers and government defenders that are roughly consistent with empirical findings. Our analysis reveals that the loss function of a government/society plays a central role in determining the types of targets likely to be attacked by terrorists in “peacetime” and “wartime”, leading to a much more frequent selection of “trophy” targets in peacetime