"Occupation by Policy" - How Victors Inadvertantly Provoke Resistance Insurgency

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan---not sure if you have used any of the new Social Network Analysis (SNA) "tools" before tied to some very,very good data search engines

I have not. The disadvantage of working outside of any institutional affiliation is that you don't get to play with the newest toys. The corresponding advantage is that you are unhampered by bureaucracy of any kind. I prefer the fringe, largely for personal reasons: I dislike bureaucracy more than I like new toys.

what they have been revealing about insurgent groups and their "eocsystems" from personalities, funding, reasons for fighting, support mechanisms, cross ecosystem linkages which can then be proven is starting get one as they say "into the game" of "seeing" and then "understanding" a target population.

Sometimes regardless of what one thinks about them "tools" can help in "understanding" complexity one normally does not see or simply overlooks.

Advanced SNA has just stated to be used by the US, but any country where internal problems occur can use the "tools". Initially used in the US on analyzing insurgent groups it can be easily used to analyze criminal gangs and their activities.

This was taken from a new Mexican Crime article on SWJ which show you how others use SNA tools in their search for "understanding".

Has it ever occurred to you that while the US invariably has access to the most sophisticated intellectual models and theories and the most technologically advanced data mining and processing capacity of any given time, American decision-makers still seem to remain singularly unable to understand the world around them? I'd submit that this is at least in part due to a tendency to be over-reliant on those intellectual models and technological marvels. Those provide useful tools, but they cannot compensate for lack of direct feet-on-ground exposure in the places we wish to understand. The US is singularly weak in this regard: we move our people around so much that they rarely if ever gain meaningful local expertise, we impose dense thickets of security measures that prevent official representatives from long term integration with populaces, and we are chronically reluctant to listen to the people who are actually in a position to understand... largely, I suspect, because they tell us what we don't want to hear.

The models and tools you describe are useful contributors, but they will not bring understanding by themselves. Mining and analysis of social media will provide useful data and important information... but anyone who thinks they can "understand" a conflict environment by reading social media postings, no matter how they are organized or processed, is simply delusional.