A trade-off between agility and resilience

In many natural or artificial settings, agility and resilience are contradictory properties of agents and populations. The settings one can imagine for this contradiction include very different objects such as computer software (agile code is small, runs fast but is more vulnerable to attacks and failures, while resilient code can be bulky and run slowly but has built-in redundancy and robustness to all kinds of attacks and system failures), military units (nonarmored versus heavily armored units), commercial companies (small and lean, or large and slow), and many other situations of interest. In this paper we discuss a mathematical model which represents a population of agents in the presence of other malicious agents, and addresses the trade-off between (a) providing resilience to objects which gives them greater ability to resist attacks but reduces their mobility to attack and destroy their potential attackers, and (b) leaving them in a more agile state where they can more effectively search and destroy their potential attackers, but where they are themselves more vulnerable to attack.