Friday, December 3, 2010
SNA in Action: Catching Roadside Bombers in Afghanistan
This is really where SNA gets about as practical as it can. Click on the post title for the article. BTW, look at the photo of the soldiers looking at a screen. The slide title is Newman Grouping, and they are most probably reviewing basic centrality measures of the type that you have learned. So you all are now armed with the knowledge of how to go out and find IEDs in a war zone! If you don't believe me, take the quiz at the bottom of the page.
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Although many experts have doubted
SNA in counter-insurgency operations, after 9/11 it was increasingly used in the warfare analysis. The US Department of Defense even established a new doctrine called Network Centric Warfare (NCW) and has invested large amounts of money in this discipline. This doctrine promotes information superiority "that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters
to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater
lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of selfsynchronization".
Ian McCulloh, a U.S. Army major, took this analysis further into an enhanced technique called “dynamic metanetwork analysis”. He developed a computer program (ORA) that finds people who are a threat by using both mathematical and social metrics. He sought to solve the problems such as noise resulting from the dynamic nature of insurgent groups. Military experts believe that his network technique has reduced the sniper activities by 70% and also reduced the IED deaths.
However, there is a growing criticism of this focus on network oriented warfare. One reason is the effects of false or biased information that can lead to erroneous conclusions and severe outcomes. In addition, the rising complexity of the analysis systems can result in frequent failures (e.g. due to congestion collapse) which may reduce the reliability of these systems.
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