Winning the story war: Strategic communication and the conflict in Afghanistan

In conflicts of the information age success in the application of force depends less on the outcome of tactical operations on the battlefields but more on how the war's purpose, course and conduct is viewed by public opinion at home as well as within the theatre of operations. Therefore western allies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not only involved in a physical struggle but also in a struggle over perceptions, for no long-term engagement of troops is possible without support from home, nor can a counterinsurgency succeed without the support of the local population. While the ability to exert influence upon various relevant target groups – opponents, the local population and the home front – has always been crucially important during conflicts, with the more recent globalized media this has led to previously unknown potential opportunities to influence audiences. With the intermixing of target audiences and the successes achieved by terrorists in the field of communication, the importance of the ideological struggle has increased enormously. In this context the concept of strategic communication has become relevant, which refers to the consistency of strategy, activities, themes and messages, and the aim of obtaining legitimacy and support. The heart of a strategic communication strategy is formed by a strategic narrative, a compelling storyline which can explain events convincingly and from which inferences can be drawn. Through a case study about the effectiveness of the execution of strategic communication during the mission in Afghanistan, the author wishes to increase the understanding of the concept.     

One-mode projection analysis and design of covert affiliation networks

Within the field of national security and counterterrorism a great need exists to understand covert organizations. To better understand these cellular structures we model and analyze these cells as a collection of subsets of all participants in the covert organization, i.e., as hypergraphs or affiliation networks. Such a covert affiliation network structure is analyzed by evaluating the one-mode projection of the corresponding hypergraph. First we provide a characterization of the total distance in the one-mode projection using its corresponding cell-shrunken version. Secondly we evaluate the one-mode projection with respect to the secrecy versus information tradeoff dilemma every covert organization has to solve. We present and analyze affiliation networks representing common covert organizational forms: star, path and semi-complete hypergraphs. In addition we evaluate an example of a covert organization wishing to conduct an attack and compare its performance to that of the common covert organizational forms. Finally we investigate affiliation networks that are optimal in the sense of balancing secrecy and information. We show how any affiliation tree can be improved by altering its structure. Finally we prove that among covert organizational forms in the class of hypertrees with the same number of cells uniform star affiliation networks are optimal.