Project Details
Understanding, measuring, and modeling strategic influence and resilience are crucial to planning successful counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism operations. Given the complexity of the problem space, however, effectively measuring the impact of our interventions that aim to increase the resilience of our ally network while decreasing the resilience of our adversaries requires a fresh and comprehensive approach. Accomplishing this in a complex computational model with a user-friendly front-end will support civilian and military analysts and decision makers, scholars and warfighters equally well.
Currently under development for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, our project fills the need for a computational modeling of a complex security space, informed with basic and deep theory research and articulated through mathematically robust algorithms to measure impact, affect, and influence. Out computational analysis tool Hermes 2.0, is based on a network model that incorporates cutting edge methods that enable using data for identifying and analyzing influence networks and then measuring their resilience based on simulated shocks. Informed by fundamental research on resilience as well as emotions, influence, and role theory, this mechanism enables identifying key actors and audiences, influence communities, central nodes, important physical and informational supply chains, and centers of gravity to better understand the hard and soft security problems for more accurate forecasts that inform operation planning. The experiential nature of the tool will help the warfighter, strategist, and scholar forecast the effects of interventions such as adding/removing nodes or introducing events based on the CAMEO codebook.