Dean S. Hartley III – författare

This volume develops and describes an ontology of modern conflict. Modern conflict is a complex adaptive system. As such, it exhibits emergent properties, or properties that are not predictable from simple descriptions of the system.  The Modern Conflict Ontology (MCO) creates a structure for collecting and analyzing information regarding both conventional and unconventional conflict in the face of uncertainty.  

In a world of accelerating unending change, perpetual surveillance, and increasing connectivity, conflict has become ever more complex. Wars are no longer limited to the traditional military conflict domains—land, sea, air; even space and cyber space. The new battlefield will be the cognitive domain and the new conflict a larger contest for power; a contest for cognitive superiority. Written by experts in military operations research and neuropsychology, this book introduces the concept of cognitive superiority and provides the keys to succeeding within a complex matrix where the only rules are the laws of physics, access to information, and the boundaries of cognition.

The book describes the adversarial environment and how it interacts with the ongoing, accelerating change that we are experiencing, irrespective of adversaries. It talks about the ascendant power of information access, pervasive surveillance, personalized persuasion, and emerging new forms of cognition. It profiles salient technologies and science, including persuasion science, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), surveillance technologies, complex adaptive systems, network science, directed human modification, and biosecurity. Readers will learn about human and machine cognition, what makes it tick, and why and how we and our technologies are vulnerable.

Following in the tradition of Sun-Tsu and von Clausewitz, this book writes a new chapter in the study of warfare and strategy. It is written for those who lead, aspire to leadership, and those who teach or persuade, especially in the fields of political science, military science, computer science, and business.

This book describes the ontology structure, types of actors, their potential actions, and ways that actions can affect the things that are part of the conflict. An ontology of unconventional conflict supports the understanding of unconventional conflict in general. It also provides a tool for understanding and investigating a particular unconventional conflict. The ontology specifies the relations among the elements and supports creating a description of a particular situation.

Unconventional conflict spans the range from natural disasters through human disagreements to irregular warfare (up to conventional war). Unconventional conflict involves damage to things and injuries to people; however, the critical factors are the actions, reactions, and opinions of people, including political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information components. This ontology supports and will appeal to military strategists, political scientists, economists, and politicians in understanding their planning for, and managing of these conflicts.