Introducing Terrorist Archetypes: Using Terrorist Objectives and Behavior to Predict New, Complex, and Changing Threats

Understanding and adapting to an evolving terrorist threat presents a significant challenge to intelligence and law enforcement communities around the world. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new approach to developing dynamic profiles for terrorist organizations to give decision makers a new tool to analyze the evolution of terrorist organizations and estimate the likelihood of future attacks. The proposed method builds on aspects of Bayesian probability and multi-objective decision analysis to adapt to the terrorist threats of the 21st Century. This approach adds to the current literature by proposing a new dynamic structure for assessing and adapting to a constantly changing landscape of terrorist threats, ideologies, and leadership. The proposed method could potentially reduce the time necessary to develop a profile for a terrorist organization, and provide an efficient method of estimating terrorist strategy and impact. These profiles could then be adjusted based on terrorist threats and actions over time. This paper concludes with an example application of the proposed method for a hypothetical terrorist scenario.