Elizabeth Bodine-Baron

Systems and operations have become more dependent on interconnected electronics and data. As that dependence grows, so does the need for mission assurance in the face of adversarial cyber operations. The authors offer ways to help wings assure their missions despite cyber attacks, focusing on how wings can maintain situational awareness, defend their systems, and respond to and recover from attacks to survive and operate when under cyber attack.

Equal Access International (EAI)'s countering violent extremism (CVE)-themed programming involves training local civil society members in Mindanao to design and implement locally based CVE campaigns. This report contains an evaluation of and recommendations from a set of EAI tech camps and fellowships in the Philippines. The authors of this report include research from a study of EAI CVE radio programming on Mindanao.

Information warfare (IW) and analogous terms of art are not new to the U.S. military's vocabulary or that of the U.S. Air Force (USAF). Yet even with the decades-old recognition by USAF leadership that IW is fundamental to all aspects of air operations, the USAF's approach to conducting IW remains relatively nascent. In this report, RAND researchers provide actionable recommendations for how the USAF should organize, train, and equip for IW.

An important consideration when deciding to mitigate or accept a risk from a cyber attack to a weapon system is how it affects operational missions. To analyze mission impact, the authors propose a methodology that aims to achieve two goals: to be comprehensive enough to be executed at the scale of each of the missions in the U.S. Air Force yet simple enough to be updated as needed to guide decisions to accept or to mitigate specific risks.

This report presents the results of an evaluation designed to assess the effects of countering violent extremism-themed social media content used in a campaign to promote tolerance, freedom of speech, and rejection of violence in Indonesia. The campaign was partially successful in its appeal to the intended audience, its communication of its message, and its positive effects on certain attitudes. However, there were also negative effects.

With the rise of social media, it has become clear that the Russian government and its proxies have found new and useful outlets in which to sow disinformation and confusion among various populations, including within the United States. This report draws on expert recommendations from academia, think tanks, and the private sector to formulate specific and actionable approaches for countering Russian social media influence.

Russia employs a sophisticated social media campaign against former Soviet states that includes news tweets, nonattributed comments on web pages, troll and bot social media accounts, and fake hashtag and Twitter campaigns. Nowhere is this threat more tangible than in Ukraine. Researchers analyzed social media data and conducted interviews with regional and security experts to understand the critical ingredients to countering this campaign.

The U.S. Air Force asked RAND Project AIR FORCE to determine where it is most fruitful to focus effort in making changes to tactics, techniques, and procedures to improve an airman's ability to detect, evaluate, and mitigate significant corruption of logistics data. The goal is to respond to errors in data before they have a significant negative effect on combat operations.

The U.S. Army has introduced the global landpower network (GLN) concept as a means to integrate, sustain, and advance the Army's considerable ongoing efforts to meet U.S. national security guidance emphasizing the importance of working closely with partner nations to achieve U.S. strategic objectives. This report develops the GLN concept further.

This report examines the ongoing debate about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Arabic Twitter to better understand the Twitter networks of ISIS supporters and opponents, using a mixed-methods analytic approach to identify and characterize in detail both support and opposition networks. The authors draw on community detection algorithms, lexical analysis to identify key themes and content, and social network analysis.

There is increasing concern that Air Force systems containing information technology are vulnerable to intelligence exploitation and offensive attack through cyberspace. In this report, the authors analyze how the Air Force acquisition/life-cycle management community can improve cybersecurity throughout the life cycle of its military systems.