Social Media Applications for Unconventional Warfare

What role might social media play in proxy and actual military campaigns? Professional thinking on the role of social media in military operations is nascent and uninformed by cutting-edge scholarship on contemporary social and political action. Applying abductive reasoning, I analyze existing scholarship to develop a framework for integrating social media considerations into the military professional's thinking on planning and conducting operations. I show that the rise of social media has fundamentally changed collective action. Individuals now play an equal or greater role than organizations in political action through powerful narratives, while traditional organizations and networks have evolved in nature and increased in complexity. This change necessitates the skilled employment of social media at the tactical level by MISO operators. I further apply this framework to unconventional warfare, an inherently interagency operation that bears the greatest similarity to recent resistance campaigns around the world, to explore the possibilities of social media intervention. This study has implications for how interagency partners, policymakers, strategists, and military commanders and planners think about and plan for social media integration not just for unconventional warfare, but into all military operations.