William Marcellino

This report defines and describes will to fight and provides a model of unit will to fight that can be applied to ground combat units of any scale. The model provides a research-grounded template for case-by-case adviser assessment of partner or allied military forces and the intelligence analysis of adversary forces. This report also provides a theoretical basis for adding will to fight to military war gaming and simulation.

Researchers from the RAND Corporation and AidData jointly built a new database on China's artificial intelligence (AI) export projects funded with official development financing. In this report, the authors analyze this quantitative dataset--adding qualitative country case studies based on interviews and social media analysis--to examine the distribution, technology, financing, and data safety aspects of China's AI exports.

Publicly available information (PAI) is a critical form of information for use in military operations. Multiple agencies within the Army collect and analyze PAI, but these efforts are disconnected and do not leverage economies of scale. This report aims to inform the Army on how to effectively acquire and develop data analytics capabilities, leveraging both commercial solutions and in-house capabilities.

The U.S. Department of Defense has influence tasks, capabilities, and missions but lacks a formal means for considering the ethics of influence operations aside from legal review. Using the principles of necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality, the authors develop a framework for evaluating influence efforts in three phases: an initial screening, a full ethical risk assessment, and a justification statement.

In the contemporary era marked by informational competition, one of the most important activities of a strategic or operational command is the development, presentation, and support of the command's narratives. Drawing on the scientific literature and lessons learned from the joint force, the authors of this report describe best practices for the effective use of command narrative.

The speed of online recruitment for violent extremist organizations has challenged existing efforts to intervene with counter-radicalization, leading to global instability and violence. The U.S. government's counter-radicalization messaging enterprise may benefit from using promising emerging technology tools, particularly bots, to rapidly detect targets of such recruitment efforts and deliver counter-radicalization content to them.

The authors examine scalable analytics to detect malign or subversive information efforts, using the 2018 World Cup as a case study. The report has operational relevance to the U.S. government. It may benefit both researchers interested in going beyond post hoc recognition of malign or subversive information campaigns to in-time detection and social media companies interested in preventing their platforms from being co-opted by malign actors.

This report presents a quantitative assessment of how the presentation of news has changed over the past 30 years and how it varies across platforms. Over time, and as society moved from "old" to "new" media, news content has generally shifted from more-objective event- and context-based reporting to reporting that is more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals.

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.

Although there are compelling national security reasons to field a robust social media analysis capability, the U.S. Department of Defense must do so while navigating U.S. law and cultural norms and under conditions of great uncertainty. This report reviews the analytic approaches that will be most valuable for information operations, as well as legal, ethical, policy, technological, and training considerations.

Integrating women into special operations forces poses potential challenges for unit cohesion. The integration of women raises issues of effectiveness, in terms of physical standards and ensuring the readiness, cohesion, and morale essential to high-performing teams. This report assesses those challenges and provides analytical support for validating occupational standards for positions controlled by U.S. Special Operations Command.

This report documents research focused on helping the Department of Defense build a more-systematic approach to hazing prevention and response. The report documents theory and research on the root causes of hazing and findings and recommendations regarding how best to define hazing, practices to prevent and respond to incidents of hazing, and how the armed forces can improve the tracking of hazing incidents.