ISIS: Past, Present, and Possible Futures Panel Discussion

Speakers: William Braniff (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland); Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (Valens Global); Dr. Lawrence Kuznar (NSI, Inc.); and Dr. Gina Ligon (University of Nebraska at Omaha)

Date: 12 November 2019

Speaker Session Preview

SMA hosted a panel discussion with Dr. Lawrence Kuznar (NSI, Inc.), Dr. Gina Ligon (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Mr. William Braniff (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland), and Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (Valens Global) as a part of its SMA CENTCOM Speaker Series.

Dr. Kuznar first discussed what most Western decision makers, journalists, pundits, and scholars got wrong about ISIS: 1) the fundamentals regarding ISIS’s idea of a caliphate, 2) that ISIS was an organization without the capacity to sustain itself, and 3) that ISIS was not religious. He then elaborated on how characterizing ISIS as not religious was a mistake and how ISIS’s “end times “narrative was compelling to many followers and recruits. To conclude, Dr. Kuznar discussed the significance of recent events, highlighting ISIS’s decision to stick with its caliphate narrative as it named its new successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, and the potential pros and cons of ISIS’s decision to stick with this narrative. Mr. Braniff then explained how ISIS is taking advantage of the road that Al Qaeda has paved over its 31 year history. Moreover, he highlighted the amount of terrorist movements spread across the globe and how each has a leader, a set of grievances to exploit, and territory that it wants to gain; however, no one knows which movement will become the next big threat. To conclude, Mr. Braniff presented several X factors (i.e., inter and intrastate conflicts, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s death, end-to-end encrypted platforms) and a series of recommendations as to what the US government should put its resources towards (i.e., conflict zones, locations of geo-strategic value, places with Al Qaeda/ISIS co-location, places with internecine fault-lines for ISIS to hijack). During her portion of the discussion, Dr. Ligon touched on ISIS’s past, highlighting that the group developed resources and capabilities that differentiated it from other violent extremist organizations (VEOs) and that it stood out as being strategically strong. She also discussed ISIS’s organizational structure and how it continues to evolve. She then spoke about present-day ISIS, while focusing on what happens to organizations that lose a leader. To conclude, Dr. Ligon discussed the future of ISIS and theorized that its top management team will become distrustful of each other and stop talking to each other, allowing the middle layer to gain power. She also suggested that there may be a period of instability and decreased attack sophistication. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross proceeded to discuss how subject matter experts (SMEs) can avoid groupthink when examining a topic such as ISIS. He explained that there is often punishment for being right and praise for being wrong in academia and stressed the importance of listening to non-majority and non-consensus viewpoints. By allowing these individuals to join the discussion, the right environment for a stronger, more accurate, more useful conversation can be cultivated. To conclude, he provided a series of comments directed towards dissenting SMEs, the customers utilizing SMEs, and majority SMEs.

Speaker Session Audio Recording

Briefing Materials

Biographies:

William Braniff

William Braniff is the Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland. He previously served as the director of practitioner education at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) and an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. Braniff is a graduate of the United States Military Academy. Following his Company Command in the U.S. Army, Braniff attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he received a master’s degree in international relations. Braniff then served as a foreign affairs specialist for the National Nuclear Security Agency. He lectures frequently for counterterrorism audiences including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Special Operations University, National Defense University, the Foreign Service Institute, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Diplomatic Security Service Antiterrorism Assistance Program, the United States Attorneys’ Office and for DHS Homeland Security Investigators. Braniff has also taken a keen interest in the field of countering violent extremism (CVE), and his input has been sought out by the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the FBI and the National Security Staff, and the National Counterterrorism Center.  He spoke at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in February 2015. Braniff has testified before Congress on four occasions, and appears regularly in national and international news media. His research focuses on domestic and international terrorism, counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism-The Hague (ICCT), the RESOLVE Network Research Advisory Board, and the Prosecution Project Advisory Board.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

A scholar, practitioner, and entrepreneur, Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the chief executive officer of Valens Global, which was recognized in both 2018 and 2019 by Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of the best entrepreneurial companies in America. The International Herald Tribune has described him as “a rising star in the counterterrorism community.” Dr. Gartenstein-Ross’s previous positions include senior advisor to the director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Community Partnerships, fellow with Google’s think tank Jigsaw, adjunct assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has extensively studied the problem of sub-state violence. His recent work has examined the intersection of sub-state violence with emerging technologies. His work on ISIS and al-Qaeda includes several books and monographs about the two groups, including Islamic State vs. al-Qaeda: Strategic Dimensions of a Patricidal Conflict (New America Foundation, 2015), which was adapted from a report he produced for the Strategic Multilayer Assessment. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has testified on his areas of core competency before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives over a dozen times, as well as before the Canadian House of Commons, including several testimonies about ISIS and al-Qaeda.

The author or volume editor of twenty-three books and monographs, Dr. Gartenstein-Ross also has a book forthcoming from Columbia University Press that explores how jihadist groups engage in organizational learning. He has published widely in the popular and academic press, and is also a member of the Editorial Board of the leading peer-reviewed journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, and recently earned a Certificate in Entrepreneurship through the Goldman Sachs Foundation’s 10,000 Small Businesses program. He can conduct research in five languages.

Lawrence A. Kuznar

Dr. Lawrence Kuznar is Chief Cultural Sciences Officer with NSI, Inc. and Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University-Fort Wayne. Dr. Kuznar conducts anthropological research relevant to counterterrorism and other areas of national security. His current research focuses on discourse analysis of Daesh leadership messaging to provide leading indicators of intent and behavior and has applied this methodology to Eastern European State and non-State Actors, Iran, and polities in the Middle East and Asia. He has developed computational models of genocide in Darfur and tribal factionalism in New Guinea, mathematical models of inequality and conflict, and integrated socio-cultural databases for predicting illicit nuclear trade and bioterrorism. He has conducted discourse analysis of the expression of conflict and enmity in Arabic, Farsi and Pashto, to identify leading indicators of conflict. Dr. Kuznar’s recent research has been funded by academic sources, the Office of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Multilayer Analysis, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), the Human Social Cultural Behavior (HSCB) modeling program of the Department of Defense, and by the US Army Corps of Engineers. He has also served on the HSCB Technical Progress Evaluation panel and a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) net assessment panel.

Gina Ligon

Dr. Gina Ligon is The Jack and Stephanie Koraleski Professor of Collaboration Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She received her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology with a Minor in Measurement and Statistics from the University of Oklahoma. She is a non-Resident Fellow for the George Washinton University Program on Extremism, and has been part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Centers of Excellence since 2010. She is the Principal Investigator and originator of the Leadership of the Extreme and Dangerous for Innovative Results (LEADIR) database.

Her research interests include profiling leaders from afar, violent ideological groups, expertise and leadership development, and collaboration management. Prior to joining UNO, she was a faculty member at Villanova University in the Department of Psychology. She also worked in St. Louis as a management consultant with the firm Psychological Associates. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of leadership, innovation, and violent groups, and she is the editor to the academic journal Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward Terrorism and Genocide.

This speaker session supported SMA’s CENTCOM project. For additional speaker sessions and project publications, please visit the CENTCOM project page.