About JTAC

Efforts to understand and anticipate threats to U.S. national security require an appreciation of social, cultural and psychological processes as well as a grounding in regional and historical contexts. The social sciences have a major role to play in anticipating threats and have the potential for developing credible models of future threats, including, but not limited to, terrorism. An integrative, cross-disciplinary approach is needed to advance efficacy in both modeling and practical policy making. Validation of formal and computational models relative to social science theory is the key to establishing standards against which models should be judged.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) within the Department of Defense (DOD) has a specific mission to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, including weapons of mass effect, against the U.S. As a result of the September 11 events, DTRA formed the Threat Anticipation Program (TAP) to anticipate future threat reduction needs. The Advanced Systems and Concepts Office (ASCO) within DTRA is chartered to anticipate future threat reduction needs and to develop advanced systems and concepts that will satisfy those needs. ASCO initiates TAP projects to explore productive areas of threat anticipation including:

  • Workshops to identify and acquire relevant expertise from the social sciences, computational science, and other communities
  • Computer model development to better understand and anticipate threatening acts of terrorism
  • Networking with universities and other federal and private sector organizations

In September 2004, DTRA supported the establishment of the Joint Threat Anticipation Center (JTAC), operated collaboratively by the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the University of Chicago and the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation (CAS2) at Argonne National Laboratory. The JTAC threat anticipation program has four objectives:

  1. Expand and champion the art and science of anticipating threats
  2. Establish a recognized “center for excellence” at the University of Chicago for threat anticipation, drawing on the expertise of the social sciences and related disciplines
  3. Develop a repository at Argonne National Laboratory for models, publications, and institutional memory of threat anticipation
  4. Assist ASCO with TAP activities and contacts that facilitate federal interagency participation