I strongly encourage HN folks to read one of the linked articles, a piece of monstrous garbage regarding a new "social sciences system" the authors claim to have developed which is a "combination of Social Sciences and System Engineering" to enable analysts to better forecast "jihadist" activities.

I am by no means a counterinsurgency or intelligence analysis expert, but I do have training in the social sciences and several decades of work in environments where I, shall we say, have encountered military thinking and doctrine.

This article to me reads as two academics insisting that THEIR social sciences disciplines are ESSENTIAL to forecasting information that western militaries desperately want to know. But, although the article repeatedly refers to their custom system ("Weber," named after the founder of sociology, not the fine outdoor grill), they never actually manage to describe the workings of the system at all; they simply narrate a variety of "scenarios," and cherry pick three instances where they claim their predictions (not previously available) were relevant or accurate.

The authors say "Weber" makes use of "53 ad-hoc parameters," and continue, "We made use of System Engineering that led us to a systemic approach." Aha, well, that certainly explains it! Continuing directly: "At that time thanks to this tooled method we took a major step toward a reflexive way of reasoning. As a result, this innovative and challenging method allowed us to achieve 23 meta-scenarios, comprising 58 sub-cases of scenarios described through visualization tools. Moreover, Weber enabled us to describe 138 different behavior patterns among the Jihadist Actors."

I've read the entire paper, and this is the closest they ever get to actually describing how their supposedly novel, "tooled system" operates.

The outputs they discuss later in the paper are actually mordantly amusing, in a Kurt Vonnegut sort of way. Take, for example, these keen insights (keeping in mind the research was conducted in 2016):

"Everywhere in the World, and especially in Africa, Al-Qaeda (AQ) began ten years ago to adopt a new tactic: “landfilling” within the societies where they were, with a long-range aim. By marriages facilitated by polygamy - a natural way to set up political alliances by blood - AQ militants established strong ties with tribes and they kept a low profile with lesser recourse to violence from that time on. Then, in some areas - for instance in coastal Libya - as early as January 2012 (through “Ansar al-Charia”) and in Syria (creation of “Jabhat al Nusra li-Ahl ash-Sham”), and in Northern Mali in January 2013 (co-rebellion of Jihadists and Tuaregs) the AQ local entities arose suddenly."

Apparently their sophisticated sociocultural analytical tooled system missed what is obviously the key reason that "AQ local entities arose suddenly" in Libya (January 2012) and northern Mali (January 2013) – I refer, of course, to the NATO bombing of Libya, the killing of Qaddafi, the complete destruction of much of Libya's state infrastructure, and the consequent dispersal of Libya's considerable arsenal to smaller, independent groups. The authors' claim that "Al-Qaeda" was pursuing a strategic, ten-year-long tactic of "landfilling" appears to be a convenient and paranoid way to describe the natural movements of younger men. How convenient that they happened to "landfill" in Libya ten years before a brutal NATO bombing campaign destroyed the central government and scattered the remaining security forces into disparate bands warring for power!

This is some kindergarten-level scholarship, which makes it exactly appropriate for NATO's forward-looking intelligence assessments, which are seldom more than gruesome fantasies for generals to whisper into the ears of their civilian overseers to secure ever-more funding for the world-destroying systems of ever-greater armaments.