Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 97

ENTANGLEMENT

trusted service members (of virtually any rank), like
firewalls, to block connections to or from undesirably influential nodes and to positively influence the
conduct of their weaker-willed compatriots.46 Both
the value and the cost of using SNA in that proactive,
risk-management approach is a subject that deserves
further exploration and review.

Conclusion
At a fundamental level, SNA is another tool to measure, understand, and react to problems influenced by
the social connectivity we all naturally share to various
degrees. SNA is a powerful tool for uncloaking the critical
context that remains obscured or unmeasured by traditional military investigations into widespread misconduct. SNA is neither new nor groundbreaking in its most
basic applications.

However, its relatively long history of use since its
inception is a result of its demonstrated utility across a
broad range of disciplines and of its usefulness in answering a wide variety of questions. SNA’s adaptation as a
visual or quantitative aid to commanders in making strategic military justice decisions would be an innovative departure from current conventional practice. Given SNA’s
ample potential and current applications, it is worth
further exploration by military justice practitioners.47
The author wishes to thank his colleagues in the U.S.
Army Government Appellate Division for their insights and
Dr. Luke Gerdes, Minerva Fellow in the Department of
Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, United States Military
Academy, for his technical review and astute suggestions. The
opinions in this article are the author’s alone and do not
represent official policy of the Department of the Army or the
Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

Maj. Dan Maurer, U.S. Army, is an LL.M. candidate at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School.
He was a 2013-2014 Fellow in the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group. As a judge advocate, he
has served as appellate counsel, brigade judge advocate, and trial prosecutor. Before law school, Maurer served as a
combat engineer officer. He has deployed to Iraq twice. He is a distinguished military graduate from James Madison
University’s ROTC program, and he earned his J.D. from The Ohio State University.

Notes
1. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the
Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 80-84, 115-123.
2. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2008), 450.
3. Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4. Malcolm K. Sparrow, “The Application of Network Analysis to
Criminal Intelligence: An Assessment of the Prospects,” Social Networks
13 (1991): 251-74.
5. Extending Sparrow’s observations further, SNA may also allow
military leaders to proactively “invest” in these informal networks as
a consequence of a more nuanced awareness of the social structures
underlying their organizations. As a result, leaders might uncover
opportunities to reinforce the cohesive bonds in such networks and
thereby increase their resistance to harmful internal “insurgencies”
(such as peer-induced misconduct) and to widely felt external traumas
(such as combat losses). In other words, network analysis can help
plant healthy trees in an orchard where few bad apples can grow.
6. Wasserman and Faust, 3.
7. David Knoke and Song Yang, Social Network Analysis (Los
Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 4.
8. Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age
(London: Vintage, 2003), 13 and 37.
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

9. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked (New York: Plume, 2003), 16.
10. Wasserman and Faust, 10; Linton C. Freeman, The Development of Social Network Analysis (Vancouver: Empirical Press, 2004):
10-30.
11. Barabasi, 30-34; Watts, 98; Wasserman and Faust, 6.
12. Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], May
2014), Appendix B.
13. Robe