Anatomizing Chemical and Biological Non-State Adversaries

NPS67-041414-04The possibility that violent non-state actors (VNSAs), including terrorists and criminals, might employ chemical or biological (CB) weapons has understandably attracted much attention in both policy and government circles. This is primarily a result of credible evidence of terrorist interest in these weapons and demonstrated terrorist willingness and capability, albeit thus far via conventional means, to inflict mass casualties. Much valuable research has been conducted in the areas of state possession of CB weapons, the vulnerability of industrial and commercial facilities to attack or infiltration, the technical capabilities required to construct CB weapons and preparations for dealing with the consequences of a large-scale chemical or biological attack. In contrast, the characteristics, decision-making and behaviors of the potential perpetrators themselves have thus far received far less attention.This research was supported awards made to the START by the Naval Postgraduate School through the Center on Contemporary Conflict’s Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC)

Change point analysis of historical battle deaths

It has been claimed and disputed that World War II has been followed by a `long peace', an unprecedented decline of war. We conduct a full changepoint analysis of well-documented, publicly-available battle deaths datasets, using new techniques that enable the robust detection of changes in the statistical properties of such heavy-tailed data. We first test and calibrate these techniques. We then demonstrate the existence of changes, independent of data presentation, at around 1910 and 1950 CE, bracketing the World Wars, and around the 1830s and 1994 CE. Our analysis provides a methodology for future investigations and an empirical basis for political and historical discussions.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figure

Routine activities and proactive police activity: a macro-scale analysis of police searches in London and New York City

This paper explored how city-level changes in routine activities were associated with changes in frequencies of police searches using six years of police records from the London Metropolitan Police Service and the New York City Police Department. Routine activities were operationalised through selecting events that potentially impacted on (a) the street population, (b) the frequency of crime or (c) the level of police activity. OLS regression results indicated that routine activity variables (e.g. day of the week, periods of high demand for police service) can explain a large proportion of the variance in search frequency throughout the year. A complex set of results emerged, revealing cross-national dissimilarities and the differential impact of certain activities (e.g. public holidays). Importantly, temporal frequencies in searches are not reducible to associations between searches and recorded street crime, nor changes in on-street population. Based on the routine activity approach, a theoretical police-action model is proposed