Complexity and Planning in the 21st Century: Intelligence Requirements to Unlock the Mystery

摘要

The strategy of battlespace dominance envisioned in Joint Vision 2010 demands that intelligence focus on support to decision-making by providing analytic estimates to reach planning decisions, and analyze opponent's reactions to those decisions. Planning for military operations in the environment envisioned in JV 2010 and Network Centric Warfare is inherently more complex than solutions that may be derived from the current joint intelligence planning doctrine based on a linear model. Understanding intelligence data and correlating it to enemy intentions in the age of asymmetric threats demands a new approach to analysis. Discovering all of the relevant data in today's ever expanding intelligence architecture and then examining the linkages between the intelligence and possible outcomes is approaching near impossibility. This problem requires new methods and tools of analysis in order to avoid what has been described as the 'curse of intended outcomes'. Data visualization tools may aid a shift in analytic techniques from the probable to the possible. By examining possible outcomes, courses of action, and developing intelligence requirements to further understand them intelligence will provide the insight necessary to avoid locking in operations which lock out success.