Disrupting Improvised Explosive Device Terror Campaigns: Basic Research Opportunities: A Workshop Report (2008)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

APPENDIX A PARTICIPANT-GENERATED LISTS OF RESEARCH SUBJECTS During the final session of each workshop, participants were invited, as a group, to create a list of research subjects that were discussed at the workshop and had resonated with them. At both workshops, participants’ comments were recorded in real time by members of the National research Council staff and projected at the front of the room for all to review. At the first workshop, no further ordering or ranking of the list occurred, and the list of the research ideas is presented below in the order in which it was created. At the second workshop, after the list was created, participants were invited to vote up to five times to reflect their particular interest in topics. The list for the second workshop has been rearranged to reflect the voting, and subjects are listed in descending order of popularity. WORKSHOP 1: FINDING THE WEAK LINKS (FEBRUARY 14-15, 2008) ! How do we gather reliable information on local cultures that harbor insurgents? And how do we translate this information into guidance for our operatives in the field? ! Ensure that research efforts are transferrable from one theater to another. (Don’t focus on Iraq and Afghanistan!) ! Study the importance of the local population to insurgent and terrorist forces. Understand relationship between host population and red organization. What different types of relationships are there? How can they be leveraged to advantage? ! Main problem is not the IEDs, but the insurgency. How do IEDs fit into the goals of the insurgency? Why pick IEDs in a particular insurgency as opposed to other weapons or tactics? Carry out comparative studies. ! Metrics: regardless of aspect of problem, what are the metrics we want to use to assess outcomes and success? Metrics of public support, environment. State estimate of the environment, and measure dynamics on the basis of different courses of action we might take. ! What incentives can we offer people to dissuade them from participating in the insurgency or encourage them to desist, and what incentive-compatible actions might follow? 55 

! How can we characterize the network of operations of an insurgent group, its vulnerabilities, and the dynamics of replacement of the network? (Dynamics and adaptation are key.) ! What makes some armed groups more adaptive than others? ! How can we characterize the adaptive environment, that is, look at adaptation of not just red, but also blue and green. ! Understanding interactions between different insurgent groups. For example, rivals may be important. ! How can we assess plans for countering IED-based insurgency before our operations begin? ! How to demotivate the terrorists by ensuring that they cannot win? ! The need for a large national database of sociocultural factors across various countries; data mining that we would need to construct the database. ! Need for a multidisciplinary approach to solve problem; need to integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches to get benefits of both. ! What are the expectations of the model? Is it better than, say, expert judgment? When do we need models, and for what? When is it smart not to use models? ! Value of comparative studies done systematically and measuring the same thing. ! Internationalize what we do—avoid cultural bias. ! Statistical analysis of adaptive process to evaluate effectiveness of countermeasures. ! Use of information outlets (such as mass media and new media) for specific subpopulations and age groups. ! What factors affect stability, and how sensitive are the factors across cultures before, during, and after operations? ! Is there a metric of insurgency likelihood? ! Can we develop technologies that facilitate experimentation and sharing of best practices for how the blue force can best engage in the human terrain? Corporate knowledge base could be a model. ! Work with the trainers, and so on (such as TRADOC and 29 Palms), on what data are needed. (Can include data format, and so on.) (Problem of scale—is it better to figure out what data are coming out of operational contexts?) ! How can outside actors influence internal political reform? Under what conditions is it most likely to occur? How best to market Western notions of freedom of speech, and so on, to other cultures? Does it make sense to try to market Western notions of democracy? How can cultural commercial marketing techniques be used? ! What lessons can be learned from other contexts to inform counterinsurgency operations? Nexus between crime and terrorism. ! What are the best means of supporting military forces to influence, negotiate with, and collaborate with people in the environment, including nongovernment organizations and host nationals? ! Developing frameworks for communicating sociocultural analysis to policy- makers and decision-makers. 56 

! Competition for limited resources—to what extent does competition for resources drive conflict? ! How do we understand and assess the uncertainty of our data, given that we have huge amounts of incomplete data? ! The need for basic understanding of trust and deception across cultures (for example, how do you measure it?). Rule book for establishing trust in different cultures. How do you find out the rules? ! Resource interdiction—what are the key resources? Interdicting which ones is the most cost-effective? Technology frontier, gaming process, adaptation. Level of information needed to make interdict resources? ! Understand the relationship between ideology and insurgency and understand the role of ideology in stimulating and sustaining insurgencies. ! Persistent surveillance (see second workshop). ! Need for new development theory of social resources. ! Role of civilians on tomorrow’s battlefield (civilians are no longer on the battlefield but are the battlefield). ! Study of roles of different types of interpersonal influence in different cultures (issues, power structure, and so on; flat vs hierarchic organizations). ! Understanding self-radicalization processes at home or not in conflict zones. (Again, do not focus only on Iraq and Afghanistan.) Understanding indicators (see also Silber et al. study). How to identify groups that blend into host nation? ! Sociopsychologic discriminators that differentiate between those who choose violence and those who do not. ! How do you assess the viability of the host-nation government? ! What groups are researchable as surrogates (for example, gangs and narcos)? ! Labeling groups and their leaders (which is also a function of size). Is there a minimal size of a network for detection or disruption purposes? WORKSHOP 2: PREDICTING IED ACTIVITIES (MARCH 17-18, 2008) 1. Decision theory—understand and quantify processes used by people in making high-risk decisions on the basis of incomplete or inconsistent data (as in the Federal Aviation Administration, weather prediction, stock traders, and so on). 2. Find a meaningful way to combine “hard” (structured) and “soft” (unstructured) data (for example, images, text, and audio). Scientists + social scientists + econometricians + . . . = integrated interdisciplinary approach. 3. Create a sanitized dataset that is representative of field data and can be used to test what a patrol might look for by using potentially available sensors, and put this out to the research community as a challenge for a prize against a withheld dataset. 4. Adversarial modeling, adversarial learning, and decision theory. 5. Searching for content in video and audio data files; content extraction in a way that is searchable. 6. Network modeling with uncertainty and taking into account that the networks are dynamic. Learn how to influence the structure and behavior of networks. 57 

7. Look at human element, (1) especially humans who are very skilled at picking out objects, and (2) characterize normal vs criminal vs terrorist—are there behavioral attributes or metrics that can be used to characterize them? 8. Visualization and presentation of results to humans in a user-friendly manner to aid in a decision; visualization for human perception in particular is important (and connected to neuroscience). 9. Search of files (such as Word, text documents, and PowerPoint) to retrieve relevant observations or conclusions that could affect a theater of operations. 10. Organize multidisciplinary groups, send them to training centers to collect data (for example, World War II operations researchers), and bring them home fairly quickly to do analysis and propose research. Interference with training and lack of historical data are difficulties. 11. Use of neuroscience techniques to enhance cognition; applied neuroscience. 12. Human-computer (mixed initiative) decision-making. 13. Develop a set of metrics to characterize the attitude space of support for an insurgency in a population, and gauge effects of counteractions. 14. Systems modeling and methods to analyze and model long-term patterns in the face of sparse observations in complex systems. 15. Create “Stop the IED-threat game”; open worldwide availability with prizes. 16. Use of wiki (collection of web pages that allows all users to contribute and modify data) methods to bring data from the field. 17. Establish institute for mathematical methods in counterterrorism. 18. Human-subjects experiments looking at multicultural and cross-cultural indicators of suspicious behavior. 19. Research in optical characterization: a. Machine translation—digitizing data to make them more user-friendly. b. Studying how the choice of measurement or analytic tool can affect tolerance of error rates. 20. Automatic speech and character recognition that is portable and easy to use. 21. Automatic analysis of optical video, but need IR dataset (related to item 10). 22. Study multiclass analysis of receiver operating characteristics. 23. Establish “guardian angel” program; provide support (such as video capability) to an off-site expert. 24. Integrate geospatial, temporal, and social-science data to create a single analytic environment. 25. Identify fundamental limits of detection. 26. How to advertise resource allocation so that adversary thinks that he or she is acting in his or her interest but is actually acting in ours (reflexive theory). 27. Gaming approach domestically to build IEDs, weapons of mass destruction—red- force approach. 28. How to identify a foreigner in a foreign country (a person who is out of place)? 29. Data handling: a. Priority-setting and filtering of data. b. Use of subsets of data. c. Distributed or centralized data processing. d. Archiving and use of data to test future theories. 58 

30. Formal concept analysis to classify and draw inferences by using IED database. 31. Data needed: entities and links between entities. 32. Analysis of open-source data available for study. 59