  We investigate the effects of topological defects (dislocations) to the
ground state of the solid-on-solid (SOS) model on a simple cubic disordered
substrate utilizing the min-cost-flow algorithm from combinatorial
optimization. The dislocations are found to destabilize and destroy the elastic
phase, particularly when the defects are placed only in partially optimized
positions. For multi defect pairs their density decreases exponentially with
the vortex core energy. Their mean distance has a maximum depending on the
vortex core energy and system size, which gives a fractal dimension of $1.27
\pm 0.02$. The maximal mean distances correspond to special vortex core
energies for which the scaling behavior of the density of dislocations change
from a pure exponential decay to a stretched one. Furthermore, an extra
introduced vortex pair is screened due to the disorder-induced defects and its
energy is linear in the vortex core energy.
