On simulating the resilience of military hub and spoke networks

Hub and spoke networks, while highly efficient, are fragile to targeted attacks: removal of the central hub destroys connectivity of the network. This fragility has led to the assertion that these networks are not suited to military distribution systems. However, military supply chains have redundancy induced by heterogeneous transportation modes (e.g., road, marine, and air) leading to enriched connectivity over a pure hub and spoke structure. In this paper a global military (hierarchical) hub and spoke network model is developed; the topological resilience of such networks are probed by stochastically sampling an ensemble of networks and simulating both random and targeted edge knockout, and the network properties relevant to resilience measured. It is found that such networks are resilient to continual attack and loss (network erosion), performing well relative to preferential (scale free) and random network benchmarks. This regime of network erosion is descriptive of modern asymmetric warfare.