Operational Tempo Research Articles

Adapting the U.S. Air Force’s combat rescue management practices could improve organizational responses to challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic

In this article, we argue that U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) pararescue teams offer a model of best practices that could be adapted by leaders of other organizations during the COVID-19 crisis. AFSOC teams recover and provide medical treatment to personnel in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our research suggests that the ability of AFSOC teams to operate effectively in situations of uncertainty, complexity, and urgency depends on several critical factors: an operational tempo that includes time for reflection;effective assessment, selection, and training of team members;risk assessment and ongoing revision of the planning process;and fluid leadership with a chief executive who maintains ultimate accountability. These same management practices could be adapted by organizational leaders to help them respond more effectively to the challenges posed by the constantly changing COVID-19 pandemic. © 2020, Brookings Institution Press. All rights reserved.

Facing Adversity and Factors Affecting Resilience: A Qualitative Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Canadian Special Operations Forces.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel are required to withstand considerable physical and psychological hardship. Research examining resilience and mental health among SOF personnel is limited and has provided mixed results; in addition, minimal research has been undertaken on the subjective experiences of adversity and the process of resilience among SOF personnel. This unique qualitative study describes the lived experience of Canadian SOF personnel, the challenges they face, and the factors they believe impact their resilience. Seventy Canadian SOF personnel participated in in-depth, semistructured interviews. A thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that operational demands, paired with an organizational culture of performance, were important stressors for most participants, negatively affecting both themselves and their families. SOF organizations select members with resilient characteristics; however, the same characteristics that make these members resilient also lead to self-imposed pressure to perform and avoid taking time for proper recovery. Team members were reported to help such members process difficult or traumatic experiences and facilitate their seeking care. Findings provide insight into the adverse experiences that participants encountered while serving in an SOF organization and the intertwined individual, social, and organizational factors affecting their resilience. Results point to the importance of managing and mitigating the impact of high operational tempo and a culture of performance to protect the health and wellness of SOF personnel and their families.

Management of Melanoma Patients by Non-Dermatologists in the Military Health System: A Retrospective Observational Study.

Compared to their civilian counterparts, military personnel can have more exposure to sunlight and, as recent studies have shown, do have an increased incidence of melanoma. Given the inherent challenges service members may face in getting appropriate care whether because of operational tempo, deployments, and/or austere locations, many are initially diagnosed by specialties other than dermatology. In this study, we sought to determine if patients within the military health system were receiving appropriate follow-up management after biopsies by non-dermatologists led to the diagnosis of melanoma by pathology. Using the Co-Path system, 1,000 patients were identified who had first time biopsies positive for melanoma. Of these, 73 were originally biopsied by non-dermatologists. Retrospective medical record review was performed to determine specialties of the non-dermatologists, staging of melanoma at diagnosis, referrals to specialists and dermatologists, and adherence to National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines. The study protocol was approved by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Institutional Review Board, protocol number WRNMMC-EDO-2017-0030, in compliance with all applicable federal regulations governing the protection of human subject research. Family medicine physicians made up the majority of non-dermatologists involved in performing biopsies that led to the diagnosis of melanoma in this study. Most patients were Stage I (pT1a), and the average time from initial biopsy to further wide excision biopsy was 18days. Sixty-seven of the 73 patients biopsied by non-dermatologists received referrals to dermatologists, and 55 of the 67 patients followed through with being seen. Follow-up full body skin exams were performed on 55 of the 73 patients, with dermatologists conducting the majority of them. National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines were followed in 45 of the 73 patients, with an additional 24 patients having insufficient evidence to determine if guidelines were adhered to. Our study demonstrated that a number of different specialties outside of dermatology are involved in performing biopsies on patients in which melanoma is a concern. Although the results show that the majority of patients biopsied by non-dermatologists received appropriate follow-up care, there is still room to improve to ensure that all melanoma patients receive referrals to and are seen by dermatologists after a diagnosis of melanoma.

More Than Just Counting Deaths: The Evolution of Suicide Surveillance in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Suicide prevention and surveillance are of primary concern to the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and to the CAF Health Services (CFHS). Suicide surveillance has been conducted on behalf of the CFHS by the Directorate of Force Health Protection for nearly 30 years. Over time, multiple changes have occurred within CAF: changes in its military role (from a primarily peacekeeping role to one also involving active combat), changes in operational tempo, temporal changes in at-risk subpopulations, as well as increased awareness and concern with suicide and suicide prevention. This has resulted in the annual reporting of CAF suicide rates and the evolution of the report's content to respond to the needs of its end users. More recently, Regular Force Army and Combat Arms males have been identified as being at significantly higher risk of suicide, relative to their counterparts, as well as to the Canadian general population. However, this trend has been fairly stable. To optimize the use of limited epidemiologic resources and to shift the focus from the rates themselves towards a better understanding of what they represent and how they can be modified, the suicide surveillance portfolio is evolving to include complementary data sources and elements. This paper describes the different data sources that constitute the CAF's enhanced suicide surveillance portfolio, the value-added evidence generated by the use of complementary data collection methods and sources, and how this evidence is used by CAF leadership in their efforts to prevent suicide amongst those who serve.

Precision Performance Nutrition What Can Special Operations Forces Communities Expect?

Modern-day warfare and operational tempo require Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel to be ready and able to perform optimally on the battlefield at all times. To do this, US Special Operations Command has invested in high-performance training centers and human performance staff, including performance dietitians. Performance dietitians are critical, because it is widely recognized that nutrition affects all aspects of health and performance, particularly for the SOF Operator. These aspects include everything from physical and sensory to psychosocial and cognitive factors, as well as environmental exposures and genetic predispositions. The impact of nutrition on performance has been well established, with specific recommendations and position stands on fueling for athletics from multiple international organizations. However, sports nutrition guidelines are based on outcomes from sample means rather than individual changes in performance. Precision performance nutrition solutions must include a systems-based approach and consider the individuality of the Operator along with their interactions with their environment. The purpose of this article is to summarize what is known about performance nutrition and outline what can be done to move toward personalized precision nutrition. We discuss pitfalls and challenges with regard to mission-specific goals, optimization versus adaptation, and longitudinal tracking; and present our view of the future.

Volumetric assessment of satellite encounter rates

Presented here is a planning and characterization tool to estimate satellite encounter rates for a prospective orbit regime. The prescribed method can be used to estimate the satellite conjunction operational tempo (i.e., the pace of conjunction activity associated with the operation of a satellite) for a given orbit against a satellite catalog. The encounter volume is defined by an ellipsoid that is constant in size, shape, and orientation in the satellite's Radial-InTrack-CrossTrack frame. For a given pair of satellites, we evaluate volumetric proximity by defining a traveling ellipsoid about the second satellite's Keplerian orbit and assessing if/when the first satellite's orbit traverses it; if inside the volume it is considered proximate. To ensure that no encounter is missed, the ellipsoid is moved along the second satellite's circular or elliptical orbit in increments of true anomaly corresponding to in-track movement much smaller than the ellipsoid's minor axis. An incremental determination of encounter probability is made if/when the first satellite's orbit track contacts the ellipsoid. When this takes place, the orbit true anomalies at ellipsoid entry and exit are captured for both satellites and converted to their respective mean anomaly ranges. The likelihood that both satellites will simultaneously be inside that encounter region is then determined from these ranges. In addition to estimating probability, the number of expected encounters over a given time span can also be approximated. The method is valid for both coplanar and non-coplanar orbits. However, our assumption of uniformly-distributed, relative in-track positions is not applicable in all satellite pairings. This trending tool is also useful in identifying such regions as graveyard orbits that are least likely to produce encounters. It can also be used to estimate how often neighboring satellites will trigger volumetric warnings when considering a candidate orbit.

Visualizing Military Explicit Knowledge using Document Clustering Techniques

Speed of decision making, increased operations tempo and enhanced situational awareness are some of the essential characteristics required by United Nations Peacekeeping forces. These can be efficiently achieved by leveraging with enhanced information processing technologies. The process of discovering essential information from the explicit knowledge and its digitization producing web and electronic documents will produce a more effective and efficient decision making environment, enhancing the value of the decision making process. The current work deals with discovering and visualizing useful patterns and knowledge especially in unstructured text, within the domain of United Nations Peacekeeping operations. Text analytics is a powerful technique that helps in achieving the aforementioned goals. Text Analytics of Unstructured Data (TAUD) framework is utilized for analyzing, discovering and visualizing essential patterns and knowledge within the military text documents. The framework focuses on data collection, pre-processing, text analytics and visualization using the hierarchical cluster analysis and K-Means algorithm. The results upon verification indicate that the technique has successfully extracted important knowledge areas or information required by the troops before being deployed in the ground operations. It will substantially help the military commanders and training officers to have an easy and efficient access to all the essential military knowledge before and during deployment on an assignment. Hence, it may lead to an efficient and enhanced situational awareness and decision making during a peacekeeping mission.

Military Identities, Conventional Capability and the Politics of NATO Standardisation at the Beginning of the Second Cold War, 1970–1980

ABSTRACTThis paper uses equipment standardisation as a lens for examining power relationships and the importance of military identity in framing the development of NATO conventional capability. In the face of the Warsaw Pact's overwhelming military capacity the logic of standardisation was compelling. Standardising equipment and making military forces interoperable reduced logistics overlap, increased the tempo of operations and allowed partners to optimise manufacturing capacity. Applied carefully, standardisation would help NATO mount a successful conventional defence of Western Europe, a crucial aspect of the Alliance's flexible response strategy. In this paper, we apply Actor Network Theory to standardisation discussions thereby revealing the incoherence and volatility of NATO's collective strategic thinking and the vast networks of countervailing interests on which this is based.

Caffeine and energy drink use by combat arms soldiers in Afghanistan as a countermeasure for sleep loss and high operational demands

ObjectivesCombat deployments are characterized by high operational demands with limited opportunities for sleep leading to fatigue and degraded cognitive and operational performance. Caffeine in moderate doses is recognized as an effective intervention for physical and cognitive decrements associated with sleep loss.MethodsThis report is based on data collected by two separate, independently conducted surveys administered in Afghanistan in 2011–2012. It assessed caffeine use and sleep disruption among U.S. Army combat soldiers (J-MHAT 8; n = 518) and among deployed soldiers with different military assignments (USARIEM Deployment Survey; n = 260).ResultsDaily caffeine intake assessed in the J-MHAT 8 survey averaged 404 ± 18 mg. In the USARIEM Deployment Survey, intake was 303 ± 29 mg and was significantly higher among combat arms soldiers (483 ± 100 mg) compared to combat service support personnel (235 ± 23 mg). In both surveys, over 55% of total caffeine intake was from energy drinks. Additional sources of caffeine included coffee, tea, sodas, gum, candy, and over-the-counter medications. Higher caffeine intake was not associated with ability to fall asleep at night or wake-up in the morning (J-MHAT 8 survey). Higher caffeine consumption was associated with disrupted sleep from high operational tempo and nighttime duties of combat operations.DiscussionOverall caffeine consumption and energy drink use in Afghanistan was greater than among non-deployed soldiers and civilians. Caffeine was frequently used as a countermeasure during night operations to offset adverse effects of sleep loss on physical and cognitive function, consistent with current Department of the Army recommendations.

A historical review of the U.S. Navy’s busiest recompression chamber in the Pacific theater with a current perspective on caring for civilian divers within its area of responsibility: short communication

On the island Nation of Guam, the United States Department of Defense has stationed military personnel from every service branch. Guam is utilized as a strategic waypoint for the U.S. military in the Pacific theater. As the largest service branch in the region, the Navy has placed a few Diving Medical Officers in Guam to collectively manage and treat patients with recompression therapy. Guam is also a popular tourist destination, with multiple recreational diving companies certifying individuals who are looking to take advantage of the beautiful warm water and exotic marine life. Unfortunately, with an increase in training and certifying inexperienced divers, came an increase in the operational tempo of the U.S. Navy's recompression chamber on Guam. The recompression chamber on Naval Base Guam (NBG) has been treating patients since 1971. With the only multiplace chamber in the Mariana Islands, Diving Medical Officers, with the accompanying chamber staff, treat military personnel, active-duty sponsored patients and civilian patients. Treating civilian patients by military providers through military treatment facilities presents multiple issues that must be addressed in an effort to provide efficient quality medical care. This article reviews the records, documents, and activity of the NBG chamber over the last four decades. Through the obtained data the information provides projected financial reimbursement from civilian patients. The article also sheds light on areas of needed improvement with regard to data collection, third-party financial collection efforts and the necessity of an inclusive electronic health record (EHR) for military and civilian patients.

Psychiatric History, Deployments, and Potential Impacts of Mental Health Care in a Combat Theater.

Increasing numbers of U.S. service members access mental health care while deployed and at home station. Multiple deployments carry with them a higher risk of exposure to combat as well as the impact of cumulative stressors associated with separation from family, hostile environments, and high operations tempo. However, mental health care resources continue to be underutilized, potentially because of higher levels of stigma regarding mental health care and concerns about career impact among service members. Some studies indicate that service members who have previously sought mental health care are likely to continue to do so proactively as needed. This study examined the associations between prior deployments, prior mental health treatment, and subsequent career-impacting recommendations (e.g., duty limitations and medical evacuation) among deployed service members seeking mental health care. Materials and. This study is a retrospective review of clinical records from three U.S. military Combat and Operational Stress Control units in Afghanistan. Data were drawn from the mental health records of 1,639 Army service members presenting for outpatient mental health services while deployed in Afghanistan from years 2006 to 2008. In an unadjusted logistic regression model, service members with at least one prior deployment had a 38% greater odds (odds ratio [OR] = 1.38, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] 1.06, 1.80; p < 0.05) of receiving career-impacting recommendations than those without a prior deployment. However, after adjusting for demographics (age, gender, marital status, rank, and military status), there was no association between prior deployments and career-impacting recommendations (OR = 1.06, 95% CI 0.78, 1.43; p = 0.716). In the second unadjusted model, service members with prior mental health treatment had a 57% lower odds (OR = 0.43, 95% CI 0.34, 0.56; p < 0.001) of receiving career-impacting recommendations than those without prior mental health treatment. After adjusting for demographics and number of prior deployments, service members with prior mental health treatment had a 58% lower odds (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.33, 0.56; p < 0.001) of receiving career-impacting recommendations than those without prior mental health treatment. Among service members who had a clinical mental health encounter, prior deployment was not associated with career-impacting recommendations and prior mental health treatment appeared to be protective against career-impacting recommendations. These results are in line with research indicating that service members who have previous experience with mental health care tend to seek help sooner than those without prior treatment. Those service members who had previously sought care were more likely to express decreased stigma and seek mental health care while deployed. Consequently, service members who have prior mental health treatment may seek care before their concerns become marked enough to warrant duty-limiting recommendations to command. These findings have important implications for campaigns to reduce stigma and promote early help-seeking among service members. Efforts should continue to study and respectively make known the rates of career impact with the goal of increased early service utilization and increased ability to sustain service members' military readiness and personal functioning.

Vicarious warfare: The counterproductive consequences of modern American military practice

ABSTRACTThis article examines contemporary modes of American warfare. It posits the concept of “vicarious warfare” as a means of capturing prominent patterns in warfighting approaches. Although rooted in long-standing traditions of military practice, vicarious warfare is sufficiently novel as to be identifiable as a distinct phenomenon. The precise manifestation or combination of vicarious methods vary according to the specific circumstances and political contexts prevailing in different theaters. However, America’s general preference is to fight its wars by delegating tasks to proxies and limiting exposure of its own military to danger. Where U.S. forces are employed directly, this takes place largely in the shadows. Such approaches have clear attractions, offer undoubted tactical advantages, and permit successive administrations to maintain a persistent tempo of operations that evades rigorous democratic scrutiny. Yet, prominent cases and numerous studies suggest that vicarious warfare has a high potential to generate counterproductive effects and significant strategic harm.

Assessing Dual-Sensor Enhanced Flight Vision Systems to Enable Equivalent Visual Operations

Synthetic vision and enhanced flight vision systems may enable a Next Generation Air Transportation System equivalent visual operations concept: that is, the ability to achieve safety and operational tempos of current-day visual flight rule operations, irrespective of the weather and visibility conditions. The operational feasibility and pilot workload of conducting straight-in instrument approaches in visibility as low as 300 ft by use of onboard dual-sensor imagery on head-up displays, without the need for or reliance on natural vision, were assessed in a motion-base simulation experiment. Twelve crews evaluated two methods of combining enhanced flight vision system imagery on pilot-flying and pilot-monitoring head-up displays, as well as the impact of adding synthetic vision to the sensor imagery, as they made approaches to runways with and without touchdown zone/centerline lights. These new methods were compared to two currently approved operations of head-up displays (with symbology only in 1800 ft visibility, and with forward-looking infrared imagery in 1000 ft visibility). The results indicated that all enhanced flight vision system concepts flown in extremely low visibilities had comparable approach, touchdown, and rollout performance without any workload penalty as compared to the two approved head-up display operational baselines. Adding synthetic vision imagery to an enhanced flight vision system provided situation awareness improvements but no discernible flight-path maintenance improvements or detriments.

Cyber Human Research from the Cyber Operator’s View

Historically, cyber security research has largely focused on improving the tools that cyber operators use in their daily jobs. As the main focus is on these tools, the cyber operator has been an afterthought in the human-machine-team. Human research in the cyber operation domain is difficult due to operations tempo and the often-sensitive information associated with the operational domain. As a result, human research in this field is under-represented, and it is a great challenge to better understand and address the needs of cyber operators. This panel brings cyber operators to the human factors community at the annual meeting to discuss their operational workflow, needs, and desires – at a publically consumable level. Our goal is to bridge the notable gap and open opportunities for human factors research in cyber security.

Combat surgical workload in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom: The definitive analysis.

Relatively few publications exist on surgical workload in the deployed military setting. This study analyzes US military combat surgical workload in Iraq and Afghanistan to gain a more thorough understanding of surgical training gaps and personnel requirements. A retrospective analysis of the Department of Defense Trauma Registry was performed for all Role 2 (R2) and Role 3 (R3) military treatment facilities from January 2001 to May 2016. International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification procedure codes were grouped into 18 categories based on functional surgical skill sets. The 189,167 surgical procedures identified were stratified by role of care, month, and year. Percentiles were calculated for the number of procedures for each skill set. A literature search was performed for publications documenting combat surgical workload during the same period. A total of 23,548 surgical procedures were performed at R2 facilities, while 165,619 surgical procedures were performed at R3 facilities. The most common surgical procedures performed overall were soft tissue (37.5%), orthopedic (13.84%), abdominal (13.01%), and vascular (6.53%). The least common surgical procedures performed overall were cardiac (0.23%), peripheral nervous system (0.53%), and spine (0.34%).Mean surgical workload at any point in time clearly underrepresented those units in highly kinetic areas, at times by an order of magnitude or more. The published literature always demonstrated workloads well in excess of the 50th percentile for the relevant time period. The published literature on combat surgical workload represents the high end of the spectrum of deployed surgical experience. These trends in surgical workload provide vital information that can be used to determine the manpower needs of future conflicts in ever-changing operational tempo environments. Our findings provide surgical types and surgical workload requirements that will be useful in surgical training and placement of medical assets in future conflicts. Epidemiologic study, level III; Care management, level III.

Forecasting Air-to-Ground Munitions Demand in Military Operations Using Markov-Modulated Poisson Process

In this paper, we examine the problem of modeling and forecasting the air-to-ground munitions demand in military operations. We consider a continuous state space time series approach and we model the munitions demand as a non-homogeneous Poisson process with intensity function that depends on a continuous-time Markovian operational tempo process. This approach is known in stochastic process as a Markov-Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP) and has successfully been applied to queuing and communication network problems. We consider four operational tempo states, corresponding to the different intensity levels of military operations. We apply the maximum likelihood estimation method to derive the MMPP model parameters, assuming that the Markov chain states are observed. We illustrate the method with an example using two time series data sets of different trends. This study provides military planners with a decision support method for forecasting munitions requirements in the face of abrupt changes in demand. An extension of the model would be to use Bayesian approach for inferring the MMPP parameters through application of a Forward-Backward type algorithm to capture potential hidden states.

Anti-icing Behavior of Thermally Sprayed Polymer Coatings

Surface engineering shows an increasing potential to provide a sustainable approach to icing problems. Currently, several passive anti-ice properties adoptable to coatings are known, but further research is required to proceed for practical applications. This is due to the fact that icing reduces safety, operational tempo, productivity and reliability of logistics, industry and infrastructure. An icing wind tunnel and a centrifugal ice adhesion test equipment can be used to evaluate and develop anti-icing and icephobic coatings for a potential use in various arctic environments, e.g., in wind power generation, oil drilling, mining and logistic industries. The present study deals with evaluation of icing properties of flame-sprayed polyethylene (PE)-based polymer coatings. In the laboratory-scale icing tests, thermally sprayed polymer coatings showed low ice adhesion compared with metals such as aluminum and stainless steel. The ice adhesion strength of the flame-sprayed PE coating was found to have approximately seven times lower ice adhesion values compared with metallic aluminum, indicating a very promising anti-icing behavior.

Effect of foreign military intervention and controlled territory on the operational tempo of al-Shabaab attacks

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (commonly referred to as al-Shabaab) is the largest radical Islamist organization in Somalia and one of the oldest Islamist militant groups operating in Africa. This article analyzes the effects of foreign military intervention and the ability of the group to control territory on the operational tempo of al-Shabaab’s terrorist campaign. We examine the monthly distribution of attacks for 1050 successful attacks that occurred between December 2007 and December 2014 to assess fluctuation in operational tempo. A multivariate model is specified to estimate the impact of prior operational tempo, external military intervention, and the group’s ability to control territory within Somalia on variation in current operational tempo. Precipitation is included in the model as a variable to control for the effect of the rainy season in sub-Saharan Africa, which potentially reduces the group’s operational tempo by limiting its mobility. Focusing on the patterns associated with individual attacks over time and their relationship to internal and external influences provides insights into the role that prior operational tempo, controlled territory, and foreign military intervention play in facilitating or constraining the operational dynamics of the al-Shabaab terrorist organization, which may be replicated by groups operating elsewhere that combine insurgency with terrorism.

Approximate dynamic programming for the dispatch of military medical evacuation assets

Military medical planners must consider the dispatching of aerial military medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) assets when preparing for and executing major combat operations. The launch authority seeks to dispatch MEDEVAC assets such that prioritized battlefield casualties are transported quickly and efficiently to nearby medical treatment facilities. We formulate a Markov decision process (MDP) model to examine the MEDEVAC dispatching problem. The large size of the problem instance motivating this research suggests that conventional exact dynamic programming algorithms are inappropriate. As such, we employ approximate dynamic programming (ADP) techniques to obtain high quality dispatch policies relative to current practices. An approximate policy iteration algorithmic strategy is applied that utilizes least squares temporal differencing for policy evaluation. We construct a representative planning scenario based on contingency operations in northern Syria both to demonstrate the applicability of our MDP model and to examine the efficacy of our proposed ADP solution methodology. A designed computational experiment is conducted to determine how selected problem features and algorithmic features affect the quality of solutions attained by our ADP policies. Results indicate that the ADP policy outperforms the myopic policy (i.e., the default policy in practice) by up to nearly 31% with regard to a lifesaving performance metric, as compared for a baseline scenario. Moreover, the ADP policy provides decreased MEDEVAC response times and utilization rates. These results benefit military medical planners interested in the development and implementation of cogent MEDEVAC tactics, techniques, and procedures for application in combat situations with a high operations tempo.

Operational Dynamics of Boko Haram's Terrorist Campaign Following Leadership Succession

ObjectiveThis article analyzes the operational dynamics of Boko Haram, the largest radical Islamist organization engaged in acts of terrorism in Nigeria.MethodWe analyze Boko Haram's terrorist campaign using information gathered from 1,086 successful attacks that occurred between July 2009 and December 2014. We examine the operational tempo of attacks on a monthly basis, identify the primary tactics employed in and targets of those attacks, and assess the outcome of each successful attack in terms of severity metrics.ResultsWe find that despite leadership changes, Boko Haram has increased the frequency of attacks, gained international media attention, and continues to pose a serious threat to security in West Africa.ConclusionsThe analysis provides a series of insights into why Boko Haram was able to complete a leadership succession and achieve this success after its initial defeat despite internal and external factors that have undermined prior terrorist campaigns. Consequently, unless the internal and/or external dynamics are altered, Boko Haram is likely to continue to conduct attacks and remain a serious threat to Nigeria and to the security of adjoining countries in West Africa.