Required Reading: The Online Operations Kill Chain

The foundation documents for our fourth quarter exercise.

Here in the last quarter of 2023 we are going to dig into the ten phases of The Online Operations Kill Chain, which I introduced in Phase-based Tactical Analysis of Online Operations. This is basically curriculum development and as such, there are some must read documents in the TOOKC Dropbox folder. Thus far there are only three:

• Phase-based Tactical Analysis of Online Operations (42 pages)

• What Makes An Influence Operation Malign? (30 pages)

• EU’s Digital Services Act (74 ponderous, deadly dull pages)

The first two Carnegie documents are easy to read and provide an excellent foundation in the structure of influence operations as well as assessing their nature.

Europeans have some capabilities to interdict trouble that we do not have, but they also have many constraints thanks to GDPR and other privacy related laws. And this 74 page Digital Services Act document is the very soul of the EU’s endless “coming to a consensus” vibe. I’m really into this sort of thing, and despite the intriguing table of contents, this may be the least interesting document on influence operations I have ever partially read. I could literally feel it sapping my will to live by page fifteen.

The content of this post will evolve, but for the moment Europeans are stuck with this ponderous stinker of a study as the only resource for their specific environment.

Let me offer a hint for those who are deeply interested in the technical analysis of such things: Information Operations Recognition: From Nonlinear Analysis to Decision-Making is a fine read in this area. The Institute for Information Recording of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine did a fantastic job with this book. I first encountered it as a seemingly freely available PDF, and it was months later I found it to be available in print here.