Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 91

ENTANGLEMENT

ideas, or social unrest—propagate through a human
population.”8
These interlocking patterns of relationships are
ubiquitous throughout nature and human-driven
activities.9 Many have observed that the key concepts
of the network perspective were “almost simultaneously discovered” by independent researchers in distinct
fields.10 As a result, SNA has become an interdisciplinary approach to research and problem solving across
many fields and has been applied in diverse areas. These
include cultural anthropology, genetics, studying the
structure of the World Wide Web, neurology, corporate
sociology, research collaboration among scientists in
numerous disciplines, decision making by community
elites, group problem solving, and the formation of coalitions.11 SNA also
has found a home
in investigations of
organized crime, terrorism, and militant
insurgencies.12
SNA researchers study network
patterns: the presence and absence of
ties between various
individuals, the
strength of those ties,
and the extent to
which those ties remain static or evolve
over time and under
what circumstances.13 These patterns
can illuminate specific actors’ social opportunities and
constraints. This, in turn, creates potential insight into
who in any particular network has a capacity to “extract better bargains in exchanges, have greater influence, and [be a] focus for deference and attention from
those in less favored positions.”14
This observation of the real world shifts the focus
away from behavior of discrete actors and their purely
intrinsic motivations. Instead, researchers adopt a view
that may better depict the social context and other
mechanisms that influence the behavior of individuals
or, alternately, how a one person’s behavior could influence others.15
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

Effectively applying a network perspective may
appear to be a paradigm shift for traditional military
culture as this perspective tasks us to look not just
at isolated offenses committed by individual parties
but also at poor discipline brewing among soldiers in
their off-duty affiliations—the connections that hold
units together beneath the surface lines of authority,
command, and control.16 Thinking of “good order and
discipline” problems as related to the structure of relationships is an adaptation of problem solving in other
domains, such as health, where harms are spread from
person to person.

Strategic Analysis for Targeting
Widespread Misconduct
To prevent a
disease outbreak
from exploding into
an epidemic, public
health officials target
not just the infected individuals with
healing medications
but also engage the
social network by
which the infection spreads. They
may use preventive
vaccines, quarantine
to close lanes that
would otherwise
facilitate the spread,
and public education
(such as safe-sex
campaigns or the exchange of needles contaminated
with HIV).17
This approach is both proactive and scalable—its
strategy is network-centric, and its tactics can be tailored to suit a given type and size of community.18 In
other words, when undesirable contagions propagate
along the social links between and among individuals,
efforts are aimed at disrupting the network itself to
abort, stem, contain, or otherwise influence those negative consequences.19
Similarly, the military—as an institution, organization, and social community—is susceptible to the
spread of misconduct and mission-defeating behaviors
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