Welcome to USMA Athena
USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.
Recent Submissions
Item The MIROR Journal: Managing Insider Risk and Organizational Resilience- Call for Papers & Back Matter(West Point Press, 2024)Call for Papers and other Back Matter for the 2024 issue of The MIROR Journal.Item Safeguarding Psychological Safety in a High Performing Organization(West Point Press, 2024)The conversation of managing insider risks and organizational resilience is a timeless concept, central to leadership discussions within organizations of every type. Building awareness of such qualitative challenges as individual concerns, discomforts, and offenses enables early risk identification within an organization. Human discomfort within an organization creates a welcome environment for threat activity endangering the organization and/or its members. The discomfort that serves as a source of the risk may originate from a non-inclusive system, a broken process, or a new requirement.Item The Use of Military Narratives in White Supremacist Chatrooms on Telegram(West Point Press, 2024)This study investigates the connections between military and white supremacist narratives in extremist channels on the social media platform Telegram. It explores military narratives as both a source of and impetus to insider threat. Narratives about the military, when combined with extremist narratives, can redirect antipathies toward legitimate leadership and drive individuals to commit violence or betray institutions. Moreover, the co-opting of military narratives to support extremism may serve to undermine public trust in and support for the military itself, posing an additional threat to national security. Scraping data from 224 public Telegram channels between September 2016 and October 2020 and selecting posts that contain military terminology, we explore connections between white supremacist and military narratives through the use of supervised machine learning techniques. We hand-code small portions of our corpus (training set) for these narratives and then label the remaining data (test set) using a machine learning classification process. The results enable analysis of the narrative network underlying the corpus. We find that white supremacist narratives are prevalent in posts with militaryterminology and frequently appear alongside military narratives. The corpus is dominated by what previous research has termed "extinction narratives," or narratives which predict the destruction of one's cultural group. Such narratives are capable motivators of violence. Military actors and themes often form the backdrop for these narratives, which vilify Jews as evil infiltrators of American institutions and cast whites as innocent victims of their machinations and of government betrayal. Military narratives lend urgency and legitimacy to these narratives that underscore white superiority and threats to the white race.Item The New Insider Threat: How Commercially Available Data can be used to Target and Persuade(West Point Press, 2024)By day, 21-year-old Jack Teixeira was a Massachusetts Air National Guard Member working on IT issues at Otis Air National Guard Base (Lamothe and Harris 2023). By night, he was the moderator of a racist, misogynistic, antisemitic Discord server threatening mass violence against marginalized communities and law enforcement officials (Harris and Oakford 2023). Notably, these two lives were not completely separate; on base, Teixeira’s colleagues feared that he was showing signs of becoming a mass shooter (Lamothe and Harris 2023). However, when the airman was finally arrested it was for another form of insider threat: classified leaks.Item Countering Insider Threat in a Fractious Society – a View from Australia(West Point Press, 2024)Insider threat is an ancient phenomenon. People who betray the trust of those around them have always existed as thieves, embezzlers, spies, saboteurs: the disgruntled. Also ancient is peoples’ tendency to live and work in groups, evolving to operate as an ordered community – as a society. Within society, insider threat is written into Western cultural artefacts (for example, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus) and is recorded across the canon of Western history. Insider threat is endemic to the human condition.
Communities in USMA Athena
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