Targeting and Visibility

With the advent of digital social media, targeting has changed, allowing for narrower, more specific operations. Also, the feedback cycle has shortened substantially, allowing for far more dynamic operations. From military doctrine prspective this fits well with OODA Loop and F3EAD. However, while the predominant mode of information dissemination has changed over the years, social theories have not; quite the contrary, they have deepened and became more sophisticated. Due to the open nature of social media, those campaigns theoretically can be observed most of the time, but given the sheer amount of noise on social networks, this may be difficult if the campaigns are very tightly targeted.

Similarly, in a historical plan, there are a vast number of examples that can be provided for large-scale operations, but it is not easy to find ones that are tightly scoped and targeted. Sometimes it is not only a matter of size and scope but resources. In the author's opinion, small budget operations must use the butterfly effect to get large-scale effects due to their resource limit. In turn, they must actuate the system in very subtle ways, which needs to be done much earlier.

In the following sections, we look at what can be targeted in terms of groups and individuals and how the different theories can be applied to the different group sizes.