Friday, March 18, 2011
Risk Scenarios
For high consequence - low frequency risks a vulnerability assessment is used to analyze the risk scape. These approaches which impose an initial condition that a certain sequence of events have occurred can be helpful to vision multiple natural and technological disasters such as those called Nat-Mat - hazardous materials caused by natural disasters. Storms can cause flooding which can result in unintentional release of hazardous materials, toxins or other dangerous materials.
How Does A Pirate Seek Its Next Target?
Hypothesis:
A pirate seeks its next target initially like a lost person. Until they aquire their next target they are apt to follow the paths of least resistance. The general statistical aspects of behavior by lost persons is presented by William G. Syrotuck in "Analysis of Lost Person Behavior" as heavily influenced by externalities and internal behavioral characteristics related to fatigue, basic emotions and other prevailing factors. These include fear of being alone, fear of darkness, fear of suffering, and fear of death. Among the observable characteristics of pirates are: the pirate skiff seeks to stay within the visual range of its mother ship especially at night. The pirate skiff most frequently moves about 30 degrees off the wind in the direction of following seas because this is the course of least resistance and minimal accelerations of the skiff. This tendency increases markedly as a function of fatigue. In certain situations the reverse is true and on the outbound leg the skiff is more likely to drive directly into the seas recognizin that the inbound leg will be more comfortable and will lead directly back to the mother ship. For tiller steered skiffs there is a bias for right hand or steerboard turns. Visibility also plays a major role with pirates operating off of a skiff. Following interview of pirates following an interdiction intelligence analysts have determined that pirates in the Somalian region attack what is visible without any discrimination about identity of target. A small skiff traveling in a seaway can often see a larger ship sooner than those aboard that larger ship can see the skiff. This is because the heigth of the target ship is much larger than the height of an eye on the target ship looking for a small skiff on the horizon.
The differences can be calculated and are very important because the movements of the pirate skiff suddenly change upon locating a target. When the pirates on the skiff spot a target their movements transistion into a classical "alligator - duck" problem where the pirates steer a course directly towards the ship they see. This usually results in a stern chase situation depending on the relative speeds of the two craft. For displacement hulls - non-planing - the speed to length ratio comes into play to determine the most probable speed of transit of either vessel.
OK - to get the discussion started lets lay out a conventional model of pirates as a risk:
A conventional operational Risk Model incorporates several dimensions:
Risk = Threat(t) * f(VulnerabilityThreat) * g(ExpVal (consequences))
Threat is regionally or spatially determined and changes as a function of time. It can be a frequency, an impact or shock function, or some other time-based variable or distribution. As an example one might determine that the chances of getting attacked by pirates in the waters off Somalia in 2010 were approximately 0.0033 or 0.33% in general but given one is within the general proximity of an attack the likelihood of attack on your vessel is much greater - especially when the pirate has the capability to attack you, can see or detect you and identify what or who you are. So when decomposed for analysis purposes, threat has several attributes including intent, capability, and awareness.
Briefly discussing these attributes -
The Intent term is a condition or state and has both longer and more immediate factors, that convey operational and tactical aspects of the threat respectively. Longer term the intent may be indicated with the generic category of the target being place on some sort of a targeting list. Short term the intent is a product of the near term decision whether or not to attack and responds to tactical information such as target detection and identification or attribution. Intent in its shotest term is the decision whether or not to attack a detected, identified, and tracked target.
Capability is also a state and has modal aspects related to availability and choice of weapons, delivery systems and the ability to effectively use such weapons in an attack over a period of time, within a particular region with magnitude, direction and duration including spatial factors.
Awareness or recognition is a condition or state that is influenced through synthesis of intelligence, identification and detection developed through surveillance leading to attribution and monitoring. Awareness is linked to intent as it is essential to achieving a state of decision to take or not to take action as far as intent is concerned.
Vulnerability can be a conditional probability reflecting the estimated change of state given a certain threat entity has decided to attack the target, with mode, magnitude, direction and duration. It can be non-dimensional and designed to register % change to the target's state of productive or operational capacity as a result of the attack relative to the initial pre-attack capacity.
The Consequences term often is not much more than a weighting function that estimates the costs of attack damage and is related to resilience - the time necessary to return the target to its pre-attack state or capacity. Consequences can be expressed as a time sensitive Expected Value of a distribution given the nature of the threat's attack and its impacts on vulnerability. The value used for Consequences depends on the objectives of the overall risk function. For example one can simply express the Expected Value from some Consequence distribution or one can take the value at a 0.90 level where 10% of consequences are above the threahold and 90 % are below. Consequences are almost always time sensitive and can have short term and longer term components. Short term consequences often predominate as Primary consequences while the Secondary consequences grow over time and are of long term and considerable magnitude relative to initial consequences. Often consequences are expressed in monetary currency such as American dollars and added are explicit terms of lives lost and injuries. Sometimes these lives lost and injuries can be expressed in near term hospitalization costs and lost future productivity terms by economists. Since resilience is often used to express the time necessary to return the target to its initial pre-attack capacity or productivity the consequences term can be used to scale the resilience term to gain better perspective of both time and costs.
A pirate seeks its next target initially like a lost person. Until they aquire their next target they are apt to follow the paths of least resistance. The general statistical aspects of behavior by lost persons is presented by William G. Syrotuck in "Analysis of Lost Person Behavior" as heavily influenced by externalities and internal behavioral characteristics related to fatigue, basic emotions and other prevailing factors. These include fear of being alone, fear of darkness, fear of suffering, and fear of death. Among the observable characteristics of pirates are: the pirate skiff seeks to stay within the visual range of its mother ship especially at night. The pirate skiff most frequently moves about 30 degrees off the wind in the direction of following seas because this is the course of least resistance and minimal accelerations of the skiff. This tendency increases markedly as a function of fatigue. In certain situations the reverse is true and on the outbound leg the skiff is more likely to drive directly into the seas recognizin that the inbound leg will be more comfortable and will lead directly back to the mother ship. For tiller steered skiffs there is a bias for right hand or steerboard turns. Visibility also plays a major role with pirates operating off of a skiff. Following interview of pirates following an interdiction intelligence analysts have determined that pirates in the Somalian region attack what is visible without any discrimination about identity of target. A small skiff traveling in a seaway can often see a larger ship sooner than those aboard that larger ship can see the skiff. This is because the heigth of the target ship is much larger than the height of an eye on the target ship looking for a small skiff on the horizon.
The differences can be calculated and are very important because the movements of the pirate skiff suddenly change upon locating a target. When the pirates on the skiff spot a target their movements transistion into a classical "alligator - duck" problem where the pirates steer a course directly towards the ship they see. This usually results in a stern chase situation depending on the relative speeds of the two craft. For displacement hulls - non-planing - the speed to length ratio comes into play to determine the most probable speed of transit of either vessel.
OK - to get the discussion started lets lay out a conventional model of pirates as a risk:
A conventional operational Risk Model incorporates several dimensions:
Risk = Threat(t) * f(VulnerabilityThreat) * g(ExpVal (consequences))
Threat is regionally or spatially determined and changes as a function of time. It can be a frequency, an impact or shock function, or some other time-based variable or distribution. As an example one might determine that the chances of getting attacked by pirates in the waters off Somalia in 2010 were approximately 0.0033 or 0.33% in general but given one is within the general proximity of an attack the likelihood of attack on your vessel is much greater - especially when the pirate has the capability to attack you, can see or detect you and identify what or who you are. So when decomposed for analysis purposes, threat has several attributes including intent, capability, and awareness.
Briefly discussing these attributes -
The Intent term is a condition or state and has both longer and more immediate factors, that convey operational and tactical aspects of the threat respectively. Longer term the intent may be indicated with the generic category of the target being place on some sort of a targeting list. Short term the intent is a product of the near term decision whether or not to attack and responds to tactical information such as target detection and identification or attribution. Intent in its shotest term is the decision whether or not to attack a detected, identified, and tracked target.
Capability is also a state and has modal aspects related to availability and choice of weapons, delivery systems and the ability to effectively use such weapons in an attack over a period of time, within a particular region with magnitude, direction and duration including spatial factors.
Awareness or recognition is a condition or state that is influenced through synthesis of intelligence, identification and detection developed through surveillance leading to attribution and monitoring. Awareness is linked to intent as it is essential to achieving a state of decision to take or not to take action as far as intent is concerned.
Vulnerability can be a conditional probability reflecting the estimated change of state given a certain threat entity has decided to attack the target, with mode, magnitude, direction and duration. It can be non-dimensional and designed to register % change to the target's state of productive or operational capacity as a result of the attack relative to the initial pre-attack capacity.
The Consequences term often is not much more than a weighting function that estimates the costs of attack damage and is related to resilience - the time necessary to return the target to its pre-attack state or capacity. Consequences can be expressed as a time sensitive Expected Value of a distribution given the nature of the threat's attack and its impacts on vulnerability. The value used for Consequences depends on the objectives of the overall risk function. For example one can simply express the Expected Value from some Consequence distribution or one can take the value at a 0.90 level where 10% of consequences are above the threahold and 90 % are below. Consequences are almost always time sensitive and can have short term and longer term components. Short term consequences often predominate as Primary consequences while the Secondary consequences grow over time and are of long term and considerable magnitude relative to initial consequences. Often consequences are expressed in monetary currency such as American dollars and added are explicit terms of lives lost and injuries. Sometimes these lives lost and injuries can be expressed in near term hospitalization costs and lost future productivity terms by economists. Since resilience is often used to express the time necessary to return the target to its initial pre-attack capacity or productivity the consequences term can be used to scale the resilience term to gain better perspective of both time and costs.
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