Occupational Specialties
Not formal, but they DO exist.
Years ago I encountered a group of studies on cybermilitias. The authors agreed that there were three constructs. I would debate them a bit about the preconditions for hierarchies to arise, but overall this is correct.
Forums – basically image board culture, a small group of content creators and a large group of actors who may take action based on what they see.
Nodes – Anonymous culture chose to avoid the term “cell” for small specialized groups due to the terror connotation, and this terminology has stuck.
Hierarchies – a nation state may recruit one or more nodes, content creators from one or more forums, and create a somewhat manageable irregular force.
I’ve always walked with one foot in light and the other in shadow. Clear back in 2009 Project VIGILANT sought to operate as a hierarchy, but forums were my re-entry point to the underworld in 2010. Having entered college in the mid-1980s I’m old enough to recall Operation Sundevil in between the numerous party fouls I committed in those years. I progressed from those two formative events to studying and sometimes participating in nodes, then forming them, and finally into a facilitator of hierarchies.
Effective nodes are small, three to six people, with a specific cause they support, a specific target they pursue, or perhaps a highly specialized skill set. There will be a company officer with the sense of what will and won’t work, and this person will have relationships with multiple other nodes. Just as in an actual military, there are NCOs who can keep things together and moving on a day to day basis.
The diversity and flexibility of these small groups also has a military analog – they’re operators, in the SOF sense of the word. Members can generally do one thing really well, they will always have secondary skills, perhaps wildly different from their primary, and when presented with a problem they will either solve it, or get someone with the right mix of capabilities to assist.
Attention Conservation Notice: This piece covers organizational development and volunteer management in conflict oriented online groups. If you are a cog in a large machine you’ve likely already experienced formal OD exercises. Social movement players may find this level of formal thinking strange, and the vast majority of working groups are in no way mindfully created and fleshed out for their duties.
Human Resources:
I periodically offer thoughts in this area, but I’ve never seen a formal document about this, so my terminology isn’t tied to anything peer reviewed. That being said, you will encounter these common positions and roles.
Company grade officer – the leader who sets the tone and who has some of the group’s core skills, although they may not be the most capable.
NCO – the person who can handle the steady state chosen tasks of the node and who may offer innovation when pressed.
Specialist role – the individual who brings some important capacity for the overall mission, but this can be just a functional attribute, a role filled by an officer or NCO.
Curator role – projects that are complex and/or long require some sort of record keeping, at times its an internal, but it’s just as likely that this is more of a research librarian role, a person who knows where to get historical information.
Fixer role – individuals whose knowledge of the core skills of the group may be no more than being well read, but they traffick information and resources for the node.
Cultural attache role – the person who knows a given subculture or who speaks another language.
Oversight role – the person who understands the “could” but who thinks about the “should”.
Force Structure:
I was entrepreneurial prior to getting into this field, so I’ve always been officer material. I grew up on a working farm, my ex wife had an organizational development practice, this led to my recognizing the importance of NCOs. There are a lot of people who want to be in charge, more than there are organized, low key assistants, so being willing to fill that role on an interim basis for an evolving node or cluster of nodes is a major facilitation skill.
Groups that are too small will grow weary and quit. Groups that grow large almost always have a schism. Three is the minimum size and double that is the optimum. Double in size again and division is all but inevitable. Recognizing the signs and encouraging the acceptance of evolution in the face of changing conditions creating recruiting opportunities is another vital skill. This is how clusters of nodes form.
Forum allegiance is very common, the bulk of participants claim one or more online communities. I’ve publicly associated with Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous, Indivisible, and the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, hereafter referred to as NAFO. This is a degree of commitment that falls somewhere between supporting a particular political candidate during a primary and being a straight ticket voter member of a party. Absent any overt betrayal internal to a node this can usually be accomplished with no more than normal growing pains.
As an example of how this worked in recent affairs, the NAFO group formed organically, the founder had some troubling history, and was then sidelined by what seems to be a funded forum creation effort led by a U.S. veteran. They chose as a totem animal the Shiba Inu, a dog breed made popular by the original Doge internal dialog meme. But the internet is made of tubes full of cats, so a NAFO Cats Division formed. There are rivalries at all levels, from the imagery used to the choice of which Discord chat server watering hole to frequent. Down at the level of clusters of nodes the rapidly evolving environment has seen the formation, fission, fusion, and natural demise of many such constructs in short amount of time.
Nearly All Volunteer:
Unlike the U.S. military, where those who serve as volunteers are slotted into a hierarchy, social movements are run by those who show up. This leads to a very mixed bag of people and the nodes they form. Some examples I’ve seen in the context of NAFO include:
Committed, pro-Ukraine clusters of nodes, deadly serious because it’s a hot war.
Committed clusters of anti-Putin nodes, longer term but slightly less intense opponents from other countries that have faced Russian aggression, with Estonia and Georgia being most notable.
Existing long term civil society oriented nodes shifted from prior activities to Ukraine, bringing diverse skills and connections with them.
Many new nodes formed of the predominantly young men who favor first person shooter games such as Call of Duty.
Western professionals active on LinkedIn reached out to Ukrainians and filled supporting roles for the other four types enumerated here.
This has been mostly good for Ukraine. The troubles I’ve seen include the usual dysfunction that kills social movement groups, which I covered in What Hunts You? The hot war in Ukraine and the curious, simmering cold civil war in the U.S. added some factors. Hacker groups involved in social movements always face intense U.S. law enforcement attention. The international nature of the support for Ukraine has dramatically complicated that. I’ve been close enough to see encounters with France’s DGSE, Ukraine’s GUR, the U.S. State Department, and various things that seemed to be FVEYS intel.
My conversations with peers have revealed that my experiences are in no way unique. There has been a multipolar mad rush to recruit anyone with experience in this area. There are two aspects of this I found disconcerting.
Danger Zone:
Seven years after Wikileaks coordinated with Roger Stone to install a Kremlin agent in the Oval Office my already jaundiced view of what Julian Assange has become is much sharper. Any hint of western ties to agencies in Russia or Russia’s allies is immediate cause for alarm. I haven’t been approached personally since 2018, but groups that are reflexively fearful of U.S. law enforcement have trouble adjusting their focus to these new threats. Russia treats their hackers as a sort of mafia state national guard, encouraging the development. The United States abuses ours, which creates a fertile, permissive environment for hostile foreign intel operations. I don’t care for what Julian has become, but I understand the pressures that drove him there after four years as an unwanted house guest of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Worse are the things I’ve seen that have to do with America’s simmering cold war. We know DHS and the FBI were ignoring reports of the potential for violence on January 6th of 2021 and the Secret Service’s deletion of text messages from that day is a de facto confession of their involvement in the plot. When I see demonization of their political opponents by supposed professionals who employ Qanon’s thinly disguised reboot of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion … not only have I read Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, just prior to that I reviewed The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
The Unites States is staggering. It may yet fall … or be pushed … into an undeniably kinetic civil conflict.
Conclusion:
The nature of war changed dramatically with the three major conflicts of the 20th century. We went from industrialized slaughter to combined arms maneuver to a long, curious standoff with lots of proxy activity at the global margins. The first two decades of the 1st century were echoes of the Cold War, specifically the asymmetry and stateless nature of things.
Now we again have great power competition, with Ukraine displaying a curious melange of factors from all three of the 20th century’s conflicts. Atop that we see drones as combatants maturing and influence reach undreamed of by the Soviets. I fear what’s next will be a reprise of Imperial Japan’s domination of the Pacific. Such a thing could not go unanswered and I dread a conflict like that, because the global choosing of sides is already apparent, and this time there isn’t a lone nuclear power in a position to quickly end things. If China, India, and Pakistan all having nukes and being in the habit of shooting at each other isn’t keeping you up at night, you’ve not understood the problem.
If I’ve learned nothing else after eight years of living in California, I know it’s easier to put out a fire when it’s one acre in size rather than one square mile. Influence ops, which are inherently online, are the smoke jumpers in that geopolitical environment.
And the people in the U.S. who get how this works are NOT the ones in charge of budgets and directions. That’s another thing that ought to be keeping you up …