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A recent publication entitled, “The US Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028”1 stated that the current strategic environment is characterized by continuous competition involving “great powers”, particularly China and Russia, which challenge in all domains and leverage the “competition” space to achieve operational and strategic objectives. For example, diplomatic, economic actions, information warfare, unconventional and conventional operations are being integrated to fracture alliances (e.g., NATO) and partnerships. In the transition from “competition” to conflict, space, cyber, electromagnetic and information would be integrated to create standoff in order to separate friendly forces over time, space and function. In response to the realization that information has significant impacts on national security (e.g., foreign manipulation of elections), Information was declared the 7th joint warfighting function. Information Operations is a subset of the Information function focused on the employment of military capabilities to change adversary behavior. Operating successfully requires the ability to characterize and assess the impact of various actions, messages, events on actors, communities and a mastery of the tools, techniques and activities to affect the dimension of the information environment (individuals, organizations and systems that collect, process, disseminate or act on information).2 This paper will introduce a Playbook concept to enable successful operations in the Information Environment (IE) based on the characterization of multiple domain information using the BEND framework3, extended beyond Social Media to encompass Information Domains or Information Related Capabilities (IRC). An example of Playbooks based on a historical scenario will be provided. Exemplars of analytics to support IE characterization will be included, along with a discussion of remaining research gaps.

A recent report on Hostile Social Manipulation stated that the tools and techniques being employed in targeted social media campaigns, sophisticated forgeries, cyberbullying and harassment of individuals, and distribution of rumors and conspiracy theories pose a “potentially significant threat to U.S. and allied national interests”. This creates a challenge for an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) force comprised of platforms, sensors, networks and personnel that have been focused on overseas contingency operations for nearly 20 years. Recent defense strategy emphatically stated, “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” Joint guidance on Operations in the Information Environment (OIE) emphasized the need for a better characterization and assessment of the informational as well as physical, and human aspects of the security environment in order to identify and leverage interdependencies between them. Carley and Beskow wrote, “Social cybersecurity is an emerging subdomain of national security that will affect all levels of future warfare, both conventional and unconventional, with strategic consequences”4 and characterized a set of 16 socio-cyber security forms of maneuver in the BEND model. This paper will introduce the BEND model, providing real-world examples of maneuvers, and highlight emerging multi-source analytics for discernment of threat.

Often after an act of violence, a forensic analysis of what the responsible individual(s) or group(s) said or wrote would reveal “signals” that would have foreshadowed the event. Although these signals frequently occur well in advance; they are often nuanced, requiring a different lens to find and interpret discursive patterns and practices related to social identity, affect, integrative cognitive complexity, trustworthiness, and worldview. Threat narrative is the behavioral (actions/words) manifestation of subjective reality regarding threat. These lenses help an analyst reason about how an individual or group sees themselves and others, their perception of threat and propensity to negotiate, cooperate or engage in violence. The result is a tomographic view, albeit imperfect one, of the threat narrative.The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has been engaged in research aimed at enabling meaning making from discourse regarding threat narratives for several years. Previous research developed multi-lingual methodologies (Arabic and Pashto), documented in primers transitioned to operational customers, including the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIIC), which enable the detection and interpretation of discourse related to social identity (in-group/out-group) (Fenstermacher et. al. 2012). This paper will focus on two projects designed to enable meaning making from the analysis of discourse, one employing a systematic approach to creating codebooks for automated analysis, and another employing taxonomies for automated analysis of identity and intent.A grounded theory approach, using human coders, was used to identify relevant discursive practices and patterns (themes and rhetorical devices), including intensifiers used to express trust, trustworthiness or distrust in Farsi. Key themes were identified such as Islam, positive virtues, and advanced age and/or experience. Association with a trusted individual, expert citation, language related to intimacy and poetry were typically associated with trust. Conversely, distrust was conveyed in themes related to negative virtues and government agendas and by use of figurative language such as metaphors and allusions.An automated approach focused on understanding the link between affect and behaviors using quantitative models of the effects of emotions (eight classes coded: trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation and joy) on behaviors of competing actors in Syria, Egypt and the Philippines (e.g., a dissident group, government and population). This approach highlights similarities and differences in resulting behaviors. For example, in both Egypt and the Philippines, societal fear, anger and disgust toward dissidents resulted in increases in dissident hostility. Conversely, in Egypt, government hostility increased in response to societal disgust whereas in Philippines it decreased.This research effort identified several apparently independent features: idea density and vocabulary diversity (proxies for integrative cognitive complexity) and affect expressed regarding in-group and out-group. Preliminary results indicate that the combination of these features would enable accurate forecasting of Naxalite bombings (.92 in sample, .8 out of sample correlation between model and actual bombings). These results are promising but preliminary; the generalization and robustness of these factors relative to different groups and languages will be assessed in a newly started research effort.The coding methodologies and the text analytic algorithms are a significant step forward in assisting analysts to systematically interpret threat narrative related language, characterize sources and reason about future behaviors and influence as well as helping to mitigate information overload by cueing analyst attention to potentially relevant documents and important events.

Traditionally, information fusion approaches to meaning making have been integrative or aggregative in nature, creating meaning “containers” in which to put content (e.g., attributes) about object classes. In a large part, this was due to the limits in technology/tools for supporting information fusion (e.g., computers). A different synthesis based approach for meaning making is described which takes advantage of computing advances. The approach is not focused on the events/behaviors being observed/sensed; instead, it is human work centric. The former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency once wrote, “Context is king. Achieving an understanding of what is happening – or will happen – comes from a truly integrated picture of an area, the situation and the various personalities in it…a layered approach over time that builds depth of understanding.”1 The synthesis based meaning making framework enables this understanding. It is holistic (both the sum and the parts, the proverbial forest and the trees), multi-perspective and emulative (as opposed to representational). The two approaches are complementary, with the synthesis based meaning making framework as a wrapper. The integrative approach would be dominant at level 0,1 fusion: data fusion, track formation and the synthesis based meaning making becomes dominant at higher fusion levels (levels 2 and 3), although both may be in play. A synthesis based approach to information fusion is thus well suited for “gray zone” challenges in which there is aggression and ambiguity and which are inherently perspective dependent (e.g., recent events in Ukraine).

United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recently published a white paper describing the “Gray Zone”, security challenges characterized by “ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, opacity of the parties involved…competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality.”1 Ambiguity and related uncertainty about actors, situations, relationships, and intent require new approaches to information collection, processing and fusion. General Votel, the current SOCOM commander, during a recent speech on “Operating in the Gray Zone” emphasized that it would be important to get left of the next crises and stated emphatically, “to do that we must understand the Human Domain.”2 This understanding of the human domain must come from making meaning based on different perspectives, including the “emic” or first person/participant and “etic” or third person/observer perspectives. Much of the information currently collected and processed is etic. Incorporation and fusion with the emic perspective enables forecasting of behaviors/events and provides context for etic information (e.g., video).3 Gray zone challenges are perspective-dependent; for example, the conflict in Ukraine is interpreted quite differently by Russia, the US and Ukraine. Russia views it as war, necessitating aggressive action, the US views it as a security issue best dealt with by economic sanctions and diplomacy and the Ukraine views it as a threat to its sovereignty.4 General Otto in the Air Force ISR 2023 vision document stated that Air Force ISR is needed to anticipate strategic surprise.5 Anticipatory analysis enabling getting left of a crisis inherently requires a greater focus on information sources that elucidate the human environment as well as new methods that elucidate not only the “who’s” and “what’s”, but the “how’s and “why’s,” extracting features and/or patterns and subtle cues useful for forecasting behaviors and events; for example discourse patterns related to social identity and integrative complexity.6 AFRL has been conducting research to enable analysts to understand the “emic” perspective based on discourse analysis methods and/or text analytics.7 Previous results demonstrated the value of fusion of emic and etic information in terms of improved accuracy (from 39% to 86%) in forecasting violent events.8 This paper will describe new work to extend this to anticipatory analysis in the gray zone.

During the 2015 SPIE DSS conference, nine panelists were invited to highlight the trends and use of context for information fusion. This paper highlights the common issues and trends presented from the panel discussion. The different panelists highlighted methods of filtering methods, data aggregation, and the importance of context for realtime analytics. Using the panelist perspectives, the review organizes the common issues and themes as well areas of future analysis of content and context enrichment from information fusion.

Aptima, 12 Gill Street, Woburn, MA, 01801 .ABSTRACT With the plethora of information, there are many aspects to contested environments such as the protection of information, network privacy, and restricted observational and entry access. In this paper, we review and contrast the perspectives of challenges and opportunities for future developm ents in contested environments. The ability to operate in a contested environment would aid societal operations for highly congeste d areas with limited bandwidth such as transportation, the lack of communication and observations after a natural disaster, or planning for situations in which freedom of movement is restricted. Differ ent perspectives were presented, but common themes incl uded (1) Domain: targets and sensors, (2) network: communications, control, and social networks, and (3) user: human interaction and analytics. The paper serves as a summary and organization of the panel discussion as towards future concerns for research n eeds in contested environments. Keywords

Today’s operators face a “double whammy” – the need to process increasing amounts of information, including “Twitter-INT” 1 (social information such as Facebook, You-Tube videos, blogs, Twitter) as well as the need to discern threat signatures in new security environments, including those in which the airspace is contested. To do this will require the Air Force to “fuse and leverage its vast capabilities in new ways.” 2 For starters, the integration of quantitative and qualitative information must be done in a way that preserves important contextual information since the goal increasingly is to identify and mitigate violence before it occurs. To do so requires a more nuanced understanding of the environment being sensed, including the human environment, ideally from the “emic” perspective; that is, from the perspective of that individual or group. This requires not only data and information that informs the understanding of how the individuals and/or groups see themselves and others (social identity) but also information on how that identity filters information in their environment which, in turn, shapes their behaviors. 3 The goal is to piece together the individual and/or collective narratives regarding threat, the threat narrative, from various sources of information. Is there a threat? If so, what is it? What is motivating the threat? What is the intent of those who pose the threat and what are their capabilities and their vulnerabilities? 4 This paper will describe preliminary investigations regarding the application of prototype hybrid information fusion method based on the threat narrative framework.

Qualia-based Exploitation of Sensing Technology (QuEST) is an approach to create a cognitive exoskeleton to improve human-machine decision quality. In this paper, we discuss the motivation of QuEST as it pertains to man-machine information fusion. Operator-based situation awareness includes both elements of external sensory perception and internal cognitive explanation. We outline QuEST elements and tenets towards a reasoning approach that achieves human intelligence amplification (IA) as opposed to data aggregation from machine artificial intelligence (AI). In a use case example for automatic target exploitation, we showcase the need for enhanced understanding of the man (mind-body cognition) and the machine (sensor-based reasoning) for establishing a cohesive narrative of situational activities.

During the SPIE 2012 conference, panelists convened to discuss “Real world issues and challenges in Human Social/Cultural/Behavioral modeling with Applications to Information Fusion.” Each panelist presented their current trends and issues. The panel had agreement on advanced situation modeling, working with users for situation awareness and sense-making, and HSCB context modeling in focusing research activities. Each panelist added different perspectives based on the domain of interest such as physical, cyber, and social attacks from which estimates and projections can be forecasted. Also, additional techniques were addressed such as interest graphs, network modeling, and variable length Markov Models. This paper summarizes the panelists discussions to highlight the common themes and the related contrasting approaches to the domains in which HSCB applies to information fusion applications.

This report represents a distillation of current social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research findings on violent extremism: What is the cultural basis for violent extremism and radicalization? What motivates individuals and groups to violence, and how is that risk measured? How does our understanding of these findings educate the mitigation of extremism? Can it be prevented or reversed? These and other topics are outlined here to open a forward-looking dialog in the research and policy community that will be crucial to formulating future research direction and for addressing this pressing national concern. This paper collection focuses less on root causes and more on solutions for risk management, disengagement (including delegitimization), and prevention of violent extremism. It also tackles the thorny issue of state terror, a subject that must enter any discussion of solutions for countering violent extremism. Ultimately, it is hoped that the paper collection can inform a better understanding of, and suggest sets of solutions for, motivating individuals and groups to desist from violence and preventing other individuals and groups from seeking involvement in movements/groups that seek to bring about change through violence. Throughout the collection, there is an undercurrent of do no harm ; that is, concomitant with suggestions for stopping or preventing violent extremisms, there are cautions an errors to avoid. These cautions implicitly ask the reader to think about things in a different way, in a way that avoids mirroring and simplistic assumptions of what others think or value and widens the timeframe in which we measure success or failure. Many goals related to countering violent extremism, especially disengagement/risk management and prevention require patience and a commitment for the long haul.