Team Spyglass goes to Fort Meade

On Friday morning, armed with coffee and laptops, we piled into a van and hit the road to Fort Meade, where Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) calls home. Our goal was to interview as many AWG operational advisers and operational support staff as possible, or in lean-startup-methodology speak — to get out of the building.

We centered our customer discovery around the hypothesis that U.S. in-country personnel feel that they lack an awareness of threats that could be identified through social media. More importantly, we wanted to hear what they felt were the pain points of their work and to get a visceral understanding of their experience on the job. What is their typical day here and in-country? What happens as they get ready for deployment, when they step foot on foreign soil, and at every stage of their experience? We wanted to “walk in their boots” and “feel” their environment to the extent that we could, being civilian graduate students removed from the theater of operations around the world where U.S. service members find themselves.

Our visit to AWG headquarters did not disappoint! We left with the impression that AWG is a special beast within the U.S. Army with the mission to identify and solve problems for the Army, as management consultants may be hired to solve problems for a private company. They are the Mr. Wolf (“Pulp Fiction”) of sorts. To that end, the men and women serving at AWG are chosen for their significant experience and, among other qualities, the ability to identify and pinpoint the heart of the matter in any given situation where they are serving in the “advise and assist” capacity. Every advise mission is different. Every “customer” varies, as do the problems AWG is tasked to help solve.

We started our visit at the range, dedicated in honor of a fallen soldier, Master Sergeant Robert Pittman, who was killed in Afghanistan while serving as an Operational Advisor. MSG Pittman was the only person AWG ever lost on the job in its 10-year history. We were carefully instructed as we fired an M4 rifle at paper targets. It was the first time firing a standard issue Army rifle for all of us. Some of us were better than others at marksmanship — time spent playing video games may have strongly correlated with our accuracy. From the difficulty of aiming in standing position, to the kickback, the smell, and the heatwave hitting one’s face, this exercise was a powerful glimpse for us into the everyday experience of U.S. Army personnel.

Memorial for MSG Pittman at Ft. Meade.

After the range, we settled into a conference room for our customer discovery interviews. Throughout the day, we spoke with 8 members of the AWG serving in different roles, from Operational Advisors (OA) to Operational Support (OS) such as communications specialists (S-6) and intelligence analysts (S-2). OS work with OAs before, during, and after their deployment to help with their missions. Our summaries below highlight the differences in roles, pain points, and takeaways we gleaned through our conversations.

1. J., Operational Advisor (Asia)

• There is a need to use social media at the OA level to gain situational awareness in the area they are in. But the OA is able to obtain information through searching social media by him/herself.
• Twitter is not a useful social media in Asia (Southeast mainly). Facebook and Instagram are more useful.
• On mission in country, he already has a routine to ensure situational awareness that includes social media search. However, it is time-limited by a wifi connection, so usually he does not have access to up-to-date data during the day.
• Hypothesis validated regarding the need for gleaning information from social media for situational awareness and self-protection; however, OAs may not be our target beneficiary because they seem to have a comparatively less need for a new solution.

2. T., Communications Analyst

• There is a redundancy plan for communications mechanisms, which includes in order of preference Primary, Alternate, Contingent (local cellular infrastructure), and Emergency (PACE) to help minimize communication failure.
• Local cell phone infrastructure is the preferred mechanism in some cases because it has more bandwidth. But no classified information goes through a cell-phone.
• Satellite communications are available in most areas, but it is considered as a tool of last resort.
• Hypothesis: N/A

3. B., Operational Advisor (Middle East)

• Major pain points of my job would be: getting past cultural barriers working with local staff. E.g., when working with or talking to a senior Iraqi officer or his troops, trying to get the officer to understand your viewpoint of the situation and intentions without offending them.
• Getting our own US coalition and advisory forces to take the same advice when working with Iraqi officers or their troops. If something’s not working in their work with Iraqi forces, they should look at the problem from a different angle.
• Finally, getting our US coalition and advisory forces to get further down to the tactical level (e.g., at the platoon or company level) when working with local
• Hypothesis partially validated

4. R., Operational Advisor (Middle East)

• Every mission and every problem is different, so there’s no typical problem. “It depends” was the most frequently used phrase.
• Operational advisors know a great deal about operational security and the digital signatures they are leaving, but conventional forces don’t think like that and many commanders don’t understand the problem. A little tidbit on social media can have huge political ramifications.
• Open source intelligence (OSINT) tells you more about what people are thinking. When cross-referenced with traditional intelligence, you could make predictive threat assessments. How do you take an aggregate of all that information and synthesize it?
• The environment drives military operations, a commander needs to know how to deploy troops and navigate that environment. Intelligence drives our knowledge of the environment, and open source is a key component of that.
• Hypothesis validated

5. T., Operational Advisor (Middle East)

• A conventional force likes to bring all of its gadgets, all of which leave signatures behind. Soldiers may not be cognizant of the fact that U.S. rules for monitoring own personnel don’t apply to other nations. Your local SIM card is transmitting everything to the Iranian telecom company.
• When activity occurs, we may not be able to observe it explicitly, but we can observe increases in electronic activity to give us an indication that something is happening. (This may dependent on cultural factors as the example was of Iraq which is a “talkative nation.”)
• A problem for commanders is that there is a wealth of information out there, but they don’t have the tools to gather that information and they don’t have the personnel to analyze that information. There is no central repository of open source intelligence. You could be pulling data at a regional level and feeding it up to a higher level.
• Hypothesis partially validated

Team Spyglass at the shooting range.

6. S., Lead Intelligence Analyst

7. E., Intelligence Analyst

8. C., Human Intelligence Collector

Key takeaways:

• We’re in a multi-domain battle environment and intelligence sources, but we don’t have all the tools to aggregate, overlay, and interpret this data in one medium to allow for different functions (electronic warfare, Geoint, cyber, HumInt, etc) to understand and relate to one another.
• Lack of tooling to enable zooming in/out to analyze and report information at appropriate levels for appropriate audience (e.g., strategic, tactical, ground level)
• In general too much information and different tools, but right now can data be mined after the fact, not in a timely predictive way. Want to tap into machine learning to allow to make more nuanced connections, decipher misinformation and doctored imagery, relate intel from different sources for more context and process. Takes too long to make those connections now. One tool to connect them all and overlay information over a table-top map/ virtual earth to visualize and make sense of all the information in one medium
• Open Source Social Media is 80% of intelligence, but the allocation of OSINT resources within in-country conventional forces is frequently spontaneous, at the discretion of the commander, with resources thrown into the social media space without preparation or tooling in an ad hoc way to fill immediate need. Social media scraping at a basic level, sometimes with linguistic support from local staff.
• Technical obstacles to having persistent connectivity to the headquarters, if the solution for in-country is cloud-based. Text capability over primary means of communication, some text and code over radio
• Hypothesis validated, but at the HQ Analyst level. The level of analysis, the goal, and the degree of zoom diverges from the needs of line troops.

Our AWG site visit reinforced the themes we heard in the few interviews we conducted earlier in the week, with the following key insights:

9. M., Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army

• Information has the power to mitigate risk and exploit opportunities. A tactical commander needs the ability to aggregate information and the personnel to make sense of the information in a timely enough manner to do either of those things.
• Social media monitoring was performed by local nationals. The commander’s concern was focused on general population sentiment, what are they saying about my forces, any negative events I should know about) and was mainly used to facilitate communication with the local populace.
• Social media’s greatest utility for force protection comes from the ability to alter patrol routes. Are people posting images of troop routes? Has general sentiment toward the U.S. military worsened in a particular region? Commanders want to know where not to send their guys.
• Hypothesis validated

10. A., Private Sector, formerly of Information Operations Command

• Biggest difference between private sector and military: “I don’t have to get anyone’s permission to do open source research”
• In the military there are different procedures for getting authorization that are dependent on the purpose of the research. A big problem is that the people who make the rules in the military are too far from the end user.
• As an Information Operations Officer, he was always assigned multiple duties (understaffed). His commander tasked him with getting general atmospherics. A positive of social media analysis is that you can use the people’s own words to engender good will. There is a problem with our own units posting information online.
• Most people at higher levels of command (06 level) do not understand the risk of cyber threats. The biggest challenge is tying a vulnerability to a specific threat to make them understand the problem, but it is challenging to prove the effectiveness of your efforts.
• Hypothesis validated

11. J., Special Forces (Afghanistan)

• He does not require access to social media. The commander on the ground requires only the information that is relevant for him.
• On high profile missions there was an intel team assigned to assist on real time. They checked social media and were able to identify postings that might be relevant within a one-hour time frame.
• Social media capabilities are more useful to manage perception by the population. Counter-insurgency can not be effective without the population support.
• Hypothesis partially validated. Social media is useful, but some capabilities are already in place. Social media is very useful for strategic information operations to influence the population.

12. J., former Team Leader of a Military Transition Team (MTT) in Afghanistan

• Force protection factors for the commander in-country rest on the fundamental question: are there specific threats I must consider today that could change the current situation, while my troops are outside of the safe zone?
• General awareness of being in hostile territory, which the intelligence briefing provides, is helpful. But need a real-time situational awareness updates as movement proceeds and situation changes while you are away from base of operation.
• Need real-time social media awareness of overtly hostile or potentially destabilizing messages and their reach (how many followers are seeing the message, how many retweets); indicators of destabilizing events (civilian casualties of US actions, misconduct by troops) that could change the population sentiment while en route; indicators of compromise of operational security.
• Factors of concern can be categorized as time, location, content, and persona.
• Hypothesis validated

Despite the difference of missions (“It depends!”), experience and roles, some common threads emerged across our customer discovery interviews this week:

1. Social media is valuable to developing situational awareness and as a source of intelligence to inform commanders’ tactical decisions.
2. Commanders want to understand when social media indicates changes in population sentiment that may jeopardize the safety of U.S. personnel, as well as signal opportunities for greater tactical engagement.
3. Real-time, predictive capability is key, but achieving this in the conditions of non-persistent or limited connectivity will be a technical hurdle.
4. The needs of the in-country personnel in social media understanding are a specific subset of the needs of intelligence analysts, which need a capability to zoom in to the tactical in-country level or zoom out to the strategic level and integrate social media data with other sources of intelligence.

It was a busy and exciting week 3 for Team Spyglass. We honed in on our original problem set and made progress on envisioning a MVP. We also began to resolve what we perceived last week as a contradiction between the needs of in-country personnel (specific) and intelligence analyst level (scaling up, down, and across). Our goal for next week is to speak to beneficiaries in the Army, e.g. commanders, soldiers, and intelligence analysts in line battalions, to understand their needs and threat environment directly. Stay tuned!