Phase Targeting of Terrorist Attacks: Simplifying Complexity with AHP and TOPSIS

This analysis examines the use of a hybrid multi-attribute decision making approach, AHP & TOPSIS, to rank order the nine phases of a terrorist attack based upon data from twenty-one different terrorist attacks. Applying statistical tools to examine frequencies, we use these frequencies to gain insights into the terrorist activities. We apply the real data and criterion weights from pairwise comparisons in order to rank order the phases of a terrorist attack. Previous, just using AHP we found that terrorist training, networking, planning, and operational prep make up over 65% of the ranking weights. Using TOPSIS we found the top four ranked ordering as Operational Prep, Recruitment, Terrorist training, and terrorist Networking that accounts for over 76%. This analysis provides counterterrorism operators with keys to look for in intelligence gathering for terrorist activities.