A simulation approach to assess law enforcement intervention impact: How the efficiency/security trade-off affects drug trafficking networks' resilience to arrests

Despite extensive research on criminal group disruption, little is known about how alternative efficiency/security configurations within drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) shape resilience under sustained law enforcement pressure. DTOs face a core trade-off: efficiency—achieved through coordination and information sharing—increases exposure, while security—based on compartmentalization and trust—constrains flexibility and scale. Although widely theorized, this trade-off has rarely been examined as alternative strategic profiles subjected to comparable enforcement conditions. We address three unresolved propositions about the efficiency/security trade-off in DTOs: whether different efficiency/security orientations within drug trafficking yield different resilience outcomes, whether security-oriented configurations should be expected to be more resilient, and how enforcement intensity and timing condition resilience. We build on MADTOR—an empirically grounded agent-based model calibrated on data from a major Italian investigation—to simulate DTO operations and multi-actor law enforcement interventions over five years. The model compares how secure, efficient, and intermediate DTOs respond to disruptions of varying intensity via survival, membership, and revenues. Results show that resilience varies across enforcement regimes: efficient DTOs perform better under lower-intensity disruption, whereas secure DTOs gain a survival advantage as arrest intensity increases and interventions are delayed through reduced exposure. These findings provide theory-driven insights that alternative strategic profiles within a shared activity domain produce distinct resilience trajectories and challenge portrayals of DTOs as uniformly profit-oriented enterprises. The study demonstrates how strategic configurations interact with enforcement intensity and timing to shape resilience outcomes, and offers a transparent simulation framework to evaluate the long-term impact of alternative interventions. • The efficiency/security trade-off shapes drug trafficking organization (DTO) resilience under enforcement. • Efficiency boosts survival without enforcement, but increases exposure under pressure. • Under repeated interventions, secure DTOs outlive efficient ones. • Intervention timing and frequency strongly condition DTO survival.