Zev Winkelman

This report describes commercial practices for cyber workforce management and organization, as determined from a literature review and interviews with reputable organizations that have similarities to the U.S. Air Force (USAF). These practices are applicable to USAF as it endeavors to improve the management of its cyber forces. The authors describe the basis for each practice, the benefits it conveys, and how it could be implemented by USAF.

The Trump administration pursued policies to confront China over its transgressive and anticompetitive economic behaviors, such as theft of technology and intellectual property and limitations on market access. In this report, the authors assess how the U.S. manufacturing, technology, and financial sectors viewed these policies and examine how to improve U.S. government interactions with the business community to support competition with China.

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.

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.

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 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.

This report examines the portfolio of tools funded by the State Department s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that help support Internet freedom and assesses the impact of these tools in promoting U.S. interests (such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the free flow of information) without enabling criminal activity."