Hearts, Minds and OSINT

The Politics of Violence

The 19th Century Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz famously summarised war as a continuation of politics with other means. Widespread democratisation of political process and the effects of mass digital communication in shaping political and cultural outlook have meant that the character of war in the 21st Century is indeed inextricably linked to politics and by extension the civilian population.

A Population Puzzle

Understanding populations is essential intelligence for military decision makers at all levels. The post 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror' operations in Iraq and Afghanistan reiterated that whilst large scale precision targeting and impressive campaign logistics can be executed by modern militaries these military achievements become meaningless and indeed often counter productive if the population is not placed at the very centre of strategic, operational, and even tactical planning.

OSINT Pivot

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is increasingly emerging as a crucial tool in the realm of population-centric warfare, offering unique insights and advantages in understanding, analysing, and influencing populations. In contemporary military strategies, where the focus has shifted from traditionally envisaged battlespaces to population-centric realities, OSINT plays a pivotal role in generating timely, accurate, relevant, and actionableintelligence at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.

Hearts and Minds

Population-centric warfare revolves around winning and maintaining the support and cooperation of the local population, recognising their significance as key stakeholders in conflict zones. OSINT, derived from publicly available sources, provides a wealth of information that aids in comprehending the cultural, social, economic, and political dynamics of a region. Equally importantly, domestically OSINT helps monitor for threats to national security, societal resilience, cohesion and ultimately perceptions of legitimacy of action by government and institutions. Importantly, OSINT insights can also help detect and define requirements for pre-conflict upstream engagement to prevent localised issues becoming violent conflicts.

Partners not Proxies

Unlike classified intelligence, OSINT is easily shared with diverse partners. The need to support and influence partners with quality intelligence can be vastly inhibited by blocks or delays due to sensitivities over sharing higher classification intelligence. OSINT can often be used to replicate to some degree intelligence insights derived from assets or capabilities at higher classifications. It is also increasingly required by democratic governments to share key intelligence with populations to retain legitimacy of government action.

Tools of the Trade

• Multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows analysts to rapidly find the intelligence insights amongst huge volumes of unstructured data in the global online space.
• Automated face, object and location recognition allow timely processing of image and video data sets into actionable intelligence.
• Commercial and open-source satellite imagery vastly increase imagery intelligence bandwidth.
• ‘Digital Exhaust' data available from open and commercial sources provide key intelligence data points such as location and movement of electronic devices in an area.
• Open-source investigations of Blockchains can provide conflict financial intelligence.
• Open-source or commercially available media, reports, studies and databases provide OSINT analysts with valuable and specific qualitative and quantitative data.
• Mis/disinformation, deep fake detection and sentiment analysis monitoring tools enhance understanding and reduce manipulation of populations.
• Active OSINT communities and private sector innovators continue to proliferate new tools and tradecraft.
• Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance to analysts is effectively turbo charging intelligence cycles by speeding up the collection, processing and analysis of complex structured and unstructured data sets.

The Future

Continued proliferation of social media, communications devices and platforms, electronic wearables and the Internet of Things indicate electronic exploit, and its OSINT component will continue to grow exponentially.

OSINT platforms are progressively being harnessed to AI capabilities delivering insight from online data at scale and pace, and it is clear OSINT is rapidly becoming the keystone of modern military intelligence.

Developing well trained human OSINT subject matter experts that can wield “AI in the loop” tradecraft ethically and effectively is the key to leveraging the as yet not fully known capabilities that Machine Learning, AI, quantum computing and 6G communications will offer.

The ability to train (and retain) our people across the Armed Forces and wider defence enterprise to improvise, adapt, and overcome remains the critical factor to defence of the realm. It is these hearts and minds first and foremost that must be nurtured and developed if we wish to go forth to support and influence populations in the increasingly competitive geo-political environment.

Matthew Hope, PENLINK COBWEBS, Business Development Executive

“Matt has spent the past 20 years in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency focused roles primarily in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. During this time, he has been both a frontline consumer and collector of diverse forms of intelligence and is now using his experience to help organisations understand the opportunities and threats presented by Digital Intelligence in the evolving physical and digital threat landscape.”