“The Social Networking Training Course is a proactive approach to information gathering through Social Networks…,” says new announcement. The training, which is scheduled to start at the end of November at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is supposed to include instruction on such areas as “Building and Managing the Social Network.”

But the Army isn’t trying to cull information from social networking sites, like Facebook. Instead, the focus is on understanding and controlling people’s social networks through a variety of techniques, ranging from conducting interviews to collecting biometrics.

Understanding social networks, particularly adversaries’ social networks, is an area of increasing interest to the military, particularly in operations conducted against insurgent and terrorist groups. This training appears to reflect this new analytical approach to intelligence collection.

The goal of the training, says the Army, is to teach ways of “identifying, predicting, and managing adversarial individuals who are not cooperative with military operational interests.”

See the full announcement here.