This Conference assessed what today we rightly or wrongly perceive as historically unprecedented changes from the perspectives of politics and history, sociology, biology, information science, and technological innovation. There is a large body of scientific work that supports the notion that human societies are complex adaptive systems with emergent properties that contain core commonalities, but the actions of which cannot be predicted with certainty. Given the properties of human cognition and social behavior, the question remains: How might nations and societies best position themselves to prepare for and manage the risks associated with rapid change under conditions of fundamental uncertainty? The conference speakers and panelists addressed these issues relevant to key domains and dimensions of global security.

This White Paper presents the analytic results from Strategic Multi-layer Assessment (SMA) project touching on the Middle East and North Africa. The objective is to suggest options to manage conflict in the region and to facilitate socio-political stability in Iraq and Syria. Options that are discussed are intentionally “out-of-the-box”, non-kinetic, and focused on potential Coalition efforts to:

The recently released White Paper entitled “Assessing and Anticipating Threats to US Security Interests: A Bio-Psycho-Social Science Approach for Understanding the Emergence of and Mitigating Violence and Terrorism” that Giordano discusses in the succeeding section provided a scientific perspective on current operations. The current White Paper provides operational perspectives on that and other relevant sciences. Previous versions outlined WHAT scientific approaches might be relevant; this iteration focuses on HOW to operationalize it.

During FY 2014, the SOCCENT Commander requested a short-term effort to understand the psychological, ideological, narrative, emotional, cultural, and inspirational (“intangible”) nature of ISIL. As shown below, the SMA1 team really addressed two related questions: “What makes ISIL attractive?” or how has the idea or ideology of ISIL gained purchase with different demographics; and “What makes ISIL successful?” or which of the organization’s characteristics and which of the tactics it has employed account for its push across Syria and Iraq.

Radicalization is a complex phenomenon informed by various disciplines. The social sciences have provided planners and operators with an understanding of the ‘who’, ‘what’, and more recently the ‘how’ of radicalization. The neuroscience community is working to expand the understanding of ‘why.’ It is essential that planners and operators, who are often on the front line of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency campaigns, have a deeper understanding of the why and how radicalization occurs. With a better understanding of the ‘why’ aspect of radicalization, planners, operators, and social scientists can move beyond purely correlative work. This report offers insights from these various fields in an easily accessible format for the operational and planning communities.

The Concepts & Analysis of Nuclear Strategy (CANS) project undertaken for US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) was tasked to examine the utility of alternative analytic techniques for assessing nuclear force attributes and sufficiency under a variety of changed conditions. The CANS software developed during this effort is designed to enhance the planning process by guiding the analyst through the process of selecting appropriate alternate analytic techniques.

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.

This brief discusses a new form of communication within networked societies—Castells’ so-called mass self-communication. The brief highlights how barriers between old and new media are disappearing as increasing technological access creates new forms of labor, challenges traditional understandings of the communication process, and empowers individuals to make otherwise inconceivable system-wide impacts.

Propaganda has evolved significantly alongside the economic and technologically-driven forces of globalization. What was once the domain of pamphlets, posters, radio, and television has adapted within an ever-expanding virtual landscape of information, as societies are increasingly linked across social and digital networks. This change has brought new challenges to countering propaganda’s effect, as the expansion of media platforms has made determining what propaganda is increasingly challenging. Depending on one’s definition, propaganda can include everything from a Chinese anime biography of Karl Marx to digital armies of coordinated social media accounts converging on targets. Given the rapidly evolving manifestations of propaganda, and the threats posed, it is important to understand the fundamental operations of how propaganda works, how it functions in societies, and how it can be countered (Nemr & Gangware, 2019).

This report supported SMA’s Integrating Information in Joint Operations (IIJO) project. For additional speaker sessions and project publications, please visit the IIJO project page.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Stuart Shulman (Texifter) as a part of its SMA General Speaker Series. Dr. Shulman’s brief focused on the ways in which one identify Internet bots and trolls by using text classification programs. He stated that though machines enable one to classify large bodies of text, it remains difficult for machines to be consistently accurate; therefore, a human must remain in the loop. Dr. Shulman then spoke about CoderRank, a program that ranks humans based on trust and knowledge vectors. The idea behind the program is, when training machines for text analysis, greater reliance should be placed on the specific inputs of those humans most likely to create a valid observation. CoderRank, therefore, is designed to identify those who are most qualified to code and classify text. Dr. Shulman proceeded to discuss lessons learned from tracking down fake accounts in the Trudeau and Biden campaigns. In the Trudeau campaign, Dr. Shulman and his team looked for biographical indicators that were not Canadian, conducted searches based on keywords, and analyzed abnormal text. In the Biden campaign, Dr. Shulman and his team looked for accounts with significant followings that had, in reality, purchased social media followers. He stated that as we move into this next technological landscape, it is only going to become more difficult to discern who is real and who is not online. Moreover, if one immerses oneself in social media profile data and looks for specific indicators, one can see a mixture of real, authentic people; human-assisted bots; bot-assisted humans; and pure bots. Dr. Shulman then spoke about bot detection based on the frequency of tweets. He and his team of coders create filters, labels, and other features in order to determine where the tweets are coming from. They also examine Twitter accounts’ networks to decipher whether or not the accounts of interest are operated by humans. Dr. Shulman expressed, however, that gaining access to data is becoming increasingly difficult due to increased regulations and data privacy restrictions, which makes it harder for him and his team to identify bots. To conclude, Dr. Shulman spoke about how his text classification and bot detecting techniques can be applied to a gaming environment, specifically with regards to veteran suicide prevention and school shooters prevention.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by LTC Stephen Battle (US 8th Army at Camp Humphreys – Republic of Korea) as a part of its SMA General Speaker Series. LTC Battle’s presentation focused on his thesis, which studies historical social movements in order to “determine a prioritized set of processes and network-based nodal relationships that can be used by both strategists during the planning processes and tacticians during the execution phase of campaigns that seek to achieve strategic aims of the US government.” He also highlighted his work’s application to the current US-China-Russia competitive environment.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Kathleen Carley (Carnegie Mellon University) as a part of its SMA DHS Speaker Series. Dr. Carley first defined and characterized social cyber-security. She then stated that social media is about networks and identified three influential groups that interact with users within these networks: 1) echochambers (a toxic group of people connected to each other that share the same ideas), 2) superspreaders (individuals that spread information and alert people of changes), and 3) superfriends (individuals that engage in dialogue to change others’ beliefs and get them to act). Dr. Carley proceeded to discuss the four D’s of traditional information warfare (dismiss, distort, dismay, and distract) and present her key findings regarding technology exploitation, social cognitive manipulation, and more general manipulation.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Dotan Haim (Dartmouth College) as a part of its SMA STRATCOM Speaker Series. During his presentation, Dr. Haim argued that the strength of civilian social networks, as well as the amount of information on government credibility received from the surrounding area, dictate whether counterinsurgency will be effective in a particular locality.

SMA hosted an exclusive Q&A session featuring Dr. Peter Singer (New America) as a part of its SMA DHS Speaker Series.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Mia Bloom (Georgia State University) as a part of its SMA DHS Speaker Series. Dr. Bloom spoke about her Minerva-funded research, which examines the themes that emerge in ISIS propaganda, the types of propaganda that are distributed, the mediums in which ISIS members communicate with one another, and the methods in which tactical innovations of actions on the battlefield are promoted within ISIS. She explained that ISIS’s primary methods of communication are via telegrams and online chatrooms. She and her team managed to infiltrate these groups to conduct their research, collecting 18,000 pieces of propaganda for their analysis. She discussed threats that were detected, reported, and prevented as a result of ISIS chatroom infiltration, as well as the types of materials collected (i.e., school books, manuals on how to build explosives, propagandistic materials targeted towards specific audiences, etc.) and what themes were identified in these materials. Dr. Bloom concluded her presentation by outlining areas for further research.

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Kristina Lerman (University of Southern California [USC] Information Sciences Institute [ISI]) as a part of its SMA DHS Speaker Series. Dr. Lerman spoke about her research, which examines the role of political ideology and social bots on Twitter during the 2016 US election and distinguishes which users may be susceptible to manipulation. She and her team collected millions of tweets between 15 September and 9 November 2016 and identified which troll accounts generated the most tweets and which media outlets liberals and conservatives retweeted. Dr. Lerman identified the topics that were most frequently discussed among liberal and conservative users, distinct characteristics of the most prolific spreaders of various tweets, and where the majority of tweets about the election originated from. To conclude the session, Dr. Lerman provided insights as to what variables are most important to consider when successfully predicting spreaders and what lessons were learned as a result of this research.

NSI just released its inaugural podcast, which features a previous SMA speaker session presented by Dr. Larry Kuznar (NSI / Indiana University- Purdue University- Fort Wayne), Dr. Allison Astorino-Courtois (NSI), and Mr. Adam Jonas (TRADOC). During this podcast, the speakers discuss their analysis of Middle East conflict and interest networks using social network analysis techniques and measures. Notable findings include the defeat of Daesh on the regional system as the prelude to broader conflict through previously unlikely alliances, cutting across ethno-religious lines. This and other points are discussed in the context of policy implications for DOD and application to the CENTCOM Reach Back effort.

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.

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

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.