Special action and counter-terrorism models

Special actions (guerrilla, anti-guerrilla, reconnaissance and sabotage, subversive, counter-terrorist, counter-sabotage, etc.) are organized and conducted by law enforcement and armed forces and are aimed at protecting citizens and ensuring national security. Since the early 2000s, the problems of special actions have attracted the attention of specialists in the field of modeling, sociologists, physicists and representatives of other sciences. This article reviews and characterizes the works in the field of modeling special actions and counterterrorism. The works are classified by modeling methods (descriptive, optimization and game-theoretic), by types and stages of actions, and by phases of management (preparation and conduct of activities). The second section presents a classification of methods and models for special actions and counterterrorism, and gives a brief overview of descriptive models. The method of geographic profiling, network games, models of dynamics of special actions, the function of victory in combat and special actions (the dependence of the probability of victory on the correlation of forces and means of the parties) are considered. The third section considers the “attacker – defender” game and its extensions: the Stackelberg game and the Stackelberg security game, as well as issues of their application in security tasks In the “attacker – defender” game and security games, known works are classified on the following grounds: the sequence of moves, the number of players and their target functions, the time horizon of the game, the degree of rationality of the players and their attitude to risk, the degree of awareness of the players. The fourth section is devoted to the description of patrolling games on a graph with discrete time and simultaneous choice by the parties of their actions (Nash equilibrium is computed to find optimal strategies). The fifth section deals with game-theoretic models of transportation security as applications of Stackelberg security games. The last section is devoted to the review and characterization of a number of models of border security in two phases of management: preparation and conduct of activities. An example of effective interaction between Coast Guard units and university researchers is considered. Promising directions for further research are the following: first, modeling of counter-terrorist and special operations to neutralize terrorist and sabotage groups with the involvement of multidepartmental and heterogeneous forces and means, second, complexification of models by levels and stages of activity cycles, third, development of game-theoretic models of combating maritime terrorism and piracy.