Quantitative Assessment of Influence Operations

The complex nature of warfare today requires a much greater emphasis on influence operations and other non-traditional means of forwarding our objectives. The war on terrorism is not a traditional war in which pitched armies conduct frontal assaults or massive airstrikes precede ground invasions. The success of the global war on terror depends intimately on various types of covert and non-covert “marketing” activities in which we “sell” our goals to important players in target populations. A major challenge is in understanding just how much impact these influence operations have. We propose the development of cutting-edge mathematical and statistical algorithms for quantifying the effects of influence operations.