Embracing the Fog of War: Assessment and Metrics in Counterinsurgency.

摘要

This monograph examines the U.S. military assessment process for counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns. It focuses on the methods employed to develop and present to policymakers theater-level assessments of ongoing campaigns. The monograph captures the complexity of the COIN operational environment, examines case studies of COIN assessment in context (i.e., Vietnam War and Enduring Freedom Operation) explores critical weaknesses in the current assessment process, and offers recommendations for improvement. The U.S. military has taken two broad approaches to assessing the progress of COIN campaigns. The first approach -- effects-based assessment (EBA) -- attempts to pinpoint and quantify events on the ground to produce centralized and highly accurate reports. The second approach -- pattern and trend analysis -- uses centralized quantitative analysis to produce a more-or-less impressionistic or, in some cases, deterministic understanding of campaign momentum. Both these approaches are centralized and rely to a great degree on quantitative measurement. In practice, the military has relied on an ad hoc approach to COIN assessment that lies somewhere between EBA and pattern and trend analysis. Neither of these two centralized assessment methods is practical for COIN because, according to U.S. military doctrine, COIN is best practiced as a decentralized type of warfare predicated on 'mission command.' Decentralization and mission command necessitate a loosely structured, localized approach to prosecuting war. It would be difficult (if not impossible) to develop a practical, centralized model for COIN assessment because complex COIN environments cannot be clearly interpreted through a centralized process that removes data from their salient local context. This monograph examines and critiques EBA and pattern and trend analysis in an effort to explain why policymakers and the public tend to be dissatisfied with U.S. military assessments of COIN campaigns.