The Lighthouse project intended to help the warfighter perform geospatial, temporal, and relational analysis of social networks by facilitating the structured collection of socio-cultural data using custom data entry forms configured for a variety of data entry platforms like mobile phones, tablets and standard computers. To demonstrate this capability, I deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan to train, advise, and assist Special Forces Teams to collect, manage, and visualize socio-cultural data. The project demonstrated how to rapidly communicate human dynamics, visualize community and group affiliations, prepare for key leader engagements, highlight potential powerbrokers, and identify information gaps about the human terrain. I develop the collection mobile applications and the extract, transform, and load pipelines using OpenRefine (previously known as Google Refine), VBA, and social network analysis tools (ORA, Palantir, Gephi). Additionally, I develop an application using VBA to calculate the intersection of line of bearing signals with aerial ellipsoid collections of radio transmissions to identify a more precise geolocation of the Taliban activity. This tool was used by intelligence analysts to assist with patterns of life.
Based on my experience during the deployment, I found that collecting and structuring relational and attribute data on key actors in order to visualize them with sociograms had the following benefits:
- Rapid Communication of Human Dynamics. Whether it is a unit’s higher commander, other members of the unit, or a unit’s replacement, sociograms can assist with communicating the human dynamics among the local actors. Visualizing the associate, family, trust, and grievance ties and affiliations among actors facilitates a clearer discussion about the human terrain. Including pictures as the nodes in the sociograms can rapidly reveal a level of understanding that would take months to develop.
- Identifies Information Gaps. No model is perfect; a sociogram will never contain all the relevant actors and social connections that exist. However, the sociogram reveals what the unit does know about the human terrain and can reveal the information gaps that will help drive future collection on relevant actors. The sociograms will continually change as a unit gains more knowledge of the human terrain in order to fill their information gaps.
- Informs the Tactical Engagement Strategy. The sociograms can help a unit make informed decisions on which actors they should interact with to gain a better understanding of the human dynamics. Units tend to gravitate towards actors that appear to be influential or hold positions of authority. These actors may try to control the people the unit interacts with. Sociograms have the potential to reveal additional target actor selection options that will help inform their tactical engagement strategy; these opportunities may not have been revealed without visualizing the social network.
For an in-depth discussion of the research discussed in this post see the following article: Visualizing Social Networks to Inform Tactical Engagement Strategies that will Influence the Human Domain | Small Wars Journal