Understanding the Enemy as a Complex System: A Multidisciplinary Analytic Problem Requiring a Multidisciplinary Team Approach
Abstract
The Air Force's intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) strategy requires the Air Force ISR enterprise to understand current and potential enemies as a system. Understanding the adversary as a complex system requires comprehensive knowledge well beyond order of battle and disposition of forces; moreover, it is fundamental to an effects-based approach to operations. This knowledge allows U.S. strategists and operational planners to predict enemy behavior and select means of attack that achieve maximum effect with maximum efficiency, whether the desired effect is to influence or to destroy. Without comprehensive knowledge of the enemy, armed conflict can degenerate into an extended, bloody, and expensive war of attrition. Developing such an understanding of foreign air and space forces as complex systems is the responsibility of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center's Global Threat Analysis Group (NASIC/GTG), whose mission is to deliver predictive intelligence on global integrated capabilities across the air, space, and information domains. GTG analysts are charged with synthesizing intelligence data and other intelligence assessments from across the breadth of "Boyd's Trinity" of "people first, ideas second, and things third" into cohesive and coherent assessments of foreign air and space warfighting capabilities and vulnerabilities, from tomorrow to as far as 20 years in the future. As the technical director for global threat, I provide senior oversight and guidance to the group's analysis and production. Assessing an adversary as a complex system is a daunting analytic task, fraught with numerous organizational and behavioral challenges and requiring extensive expertise in multiple disciplines. This article examines two of those challenges -- analyst expertise and teamwork -- and recommends changes that the Air Force's ISR leaders can consider to overcome them.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA597403
Entities
People
- D. L. Fuell Jr.
Organizations
- National Air and Space Intelligence Center