At the request of the U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (USSC) the J-39 Strategic-Multilayer Assessment (SMA) Branch undertook a Coordinator’s Mission Review in July 2014 and concluded it in February 2015. This SMA project resulted in an unprecedented collaborative effort among over one hundred subject-matter experts from numerous organizations across the Department of Defense, U.S. Government Departments and Intelligence Agencies, Academia, Think Tanks, and Private Industry. The work of these subject- matter experts is summarized in this white paper.

It would be comforting to be able to find some constants, some footholds in our understanding of terrorism. It is, in fact, the element of mystery as to what drives people to collective violence that makes us uncomfortable -- that fills us with terror. Researchers, policy makers, those who must combat terrorism, and the public hope for some simple formula for radicalization, a program or set of programs that will prevent groups of people from deliberately targeting other people in order to meet their needs (political, economic, social, etc). There is no magic formula within this paper collection, but there are a variety of perspectives that, either in isolation or when integrated, provide new ways to think about terrorism and potentially to inform decisions that will abate this global phenomenon, not exacerbate it.

The physical, social, political, economic, and cultural systems comprise the operational environment and interact in complex ways. The Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) Anticipating the Future Operational Environment (AFOE) project models this complexity with special relevance to US national security concerns. The AFOE team constructed a generic Global Exploitable Conditions Model (GECM) that captured this complexity as a system of nodes, or variables, and edges, which are the relationships between nodes. The generic GECM was then tailored to the specifics of the USAFRICOM AOR to produce the AFRICOM Exploitable Conditions Model (AECM). A subsystem of the AECM was extracted to align with key USAFRICOM objectives in the greater Sahelian region: a part of the African continent encompassing 24 countries in the Western and Eastern African zones, and two countries from the Central African zone. These countries generally occupy the area between the Sahara Desert and the tropical forest regions of Africa and are the focus of a designated Sahelian system model.

The physical, social, political, economic, and cultural systems that comprise the operational environment interact in complex ways. The Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) Anticipating the Future Operational Environment (AFOE) project models this complexity with special relevance to US national security concerns. The AFOE team constructed a generic Global Exploitable Conditions Model (GECM) that captured this complexity as a system of nodes (or variables) and edges, which are the relationships between nodes. The generic model was then tailored to the specifics of the USAFRICOM AOR as the African Exploitable Conditions Model (AECM). This report describes a network analysis of the AECM that provides insight into important conditions and dynamics that impact USAFRICOM’s mission objectives.

Success in the global competition between the US, China, and Russia may be determined by a country’s ability to influence the world’s populations. A population’s aspirations and grievances can drive national security problems for all three powers when frustrated aspirations and grievances lead to state instability, terrorism, or other challenges such as unwanted or unmanaged migration. In accordance with the questions posed in the J39 Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) Great Power Competition tasking, this report summarizes context-specific qualitative and quantitative analyses of the conditions impacting population aspirations and grievances for 25 countries, and how these impact US, Chinese, and Russian interests. Issues include:

This paper provides the TRADOC G27 Models and Simulations Branch initial assessment for Phases I and II of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) CENTCOM Afghanistan project. Phase I specifically assessed the impact of three different hypothetical Afghan government constructs: Centralized, Enhanced Local Governance and Decentralized (regional). Phase II focused on the potential outcomes of a negotiated settlement including: truce, power-sharing Afghan government, and reconciliation.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by LTC Tom Pike (US Army Strategic Studies Institute) as a part of its SMA General Speaker Series. After summarizing his main conclusions, LTC Pike discussed the “magnificent trinity” (AKA the “three-body problem”), as well as Carl von Clausewitz’s principle that war is a nonreducible, interdependent system.

Security and privacy aren’t dichotomous or conflicting concerns—the solution lies in developing and integrating advanced information technologies for counterterrorism along with privacy-protection technologies to safeguard civil liberties. Coordinated policies can help bind the two to their intended use.

In this paper we describe a novel data association algorithm, termed m-best S-D, that determines in O(mSkn^3) time (m assignments, S >=3 lists of size n, k relaxations) the (approximately) m-best solutions to an S-D assignment problem. The m-best S-D algorithm is applicable to tracking problems where either the sensors are synchronized or the sensors and/or the targets are very slow moving.

To date, there has been a lack of efficient and practical distributed- and shared-memory parallelizations of the data association problem for multitarget tracking.

This book explores both counter-terrorism and enabling policy dimensions of emerging information technologies in national security.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest within the tracking community in an approach to data association based on the m-best two-dimensional (2-D) assignment algorithm. Much of the interest has been spurred by its ability to provide various efficient data association solutions, including joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) and multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT).

The focus of this paper is to present the results of our investigation and evaluation of various shared-memory parallelizations of the data association problem in multitarget tracking. The multitarget tracking algorithm developed was for a sparse air traffic surveillance problem, and is based on an Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) state estimator embedded into the (2D) assignment framework.

The interacting multiple model (IMM) estimator has been shown to be very effective when applied to air traffic surveillance problems. Hence, in an effort to design a real-time multiple model multi-target tracking algorithm that is independent of the number of modules used in the state estimator, we propose a “coarse-grained” (dynamic) parallelization that is superior, in terms of computational performance, to a “fine-grained” (static) parallelization of the state estimator, while not sacrificing tracking accuracy.

September 11, 2001 might have been just another day if the U.S. intelligence agencies had been better equipped with information technology, according to the report of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.