This report defines and describes will to fight and provides a model of unit will to fight that can be applied to ground combat units of any scale. The model provides a research-grounded template for case-by-case adviser assessment of partner or allied military forces and the intelligence analysis of adversary forces. This report also provides a theoretical basis for adding will to fight to military war gaming and simulation.
The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions, often operating outside effective governance structures. Frequently, these actors are human agents, such as rogue traders or aggressive financial innovators, terrorists, groups of dissidents, or unauthorized sources of sensitive or secret information about government or private sector activities. In other instances, influential "actors" take the form of climate change, communications technologies, or socioeconomic globalization. Although these individual forces may be small relative to state governments or international institutions, or may operate on long time scales, the changes they catalyze can pose significant challenges to the analysis and practice of international relations through the operation of complex feedbacks and interactions of individual agents and interconnected systems. We call these challenges "femtorisks," and emphasize their importance for two reasons. First, in isolation, they may be inconsequential and semiautonomous; but when embedded in complex adaptive systems, characterized by individual agents able to change, learn from experience, and pursue their own agendas, the strategic interaction between actors can propel systems down paths of increasing, even global, instability. Second, because their influence stems from complex interactions at interfaces of multiple systems (e.g., social, financial, political, technological, ecological, etc.), femtorisks challenge standard approaches to risk assessment, as higher-order consequences cascade across the boundaries of socially constructed complex systems. We argue that new approaches to assessing and managing systemic risk in international relations are required, inspired by principles of evolutionary theory and development of resilient ecological systems.
The United States Intelligence Community (IC) was born out of the experiences and organization of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and became a permanent fixture of the national security establishment with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Since its inception, there has been a strong fascination with the secret aspects of its work, particularly with respect to the clandestine collection of information and covert efforts to influence foreign governments, and to undermine rival intelligence services. By comparison, intelligence analysis, specifically the ways in which intelligence professionals develop and present assessments about the international system to policy makers, has been relatively ignored. As a result, intelligence analysis has remained largely under-theorized within the study of international relations, despite its prominent role in strategic thinking – only receiving significant attention in the aftermath of perceived failures.
The world today is increasingly confronted with systemic threats and challenges, in which femtorisks - small-scale dangers that are inherent to system structures and function and which pose asymmetrically catastrophic risks - can build in consequence, spreading uncontrollably like epidemics in both natural and social systems in such diverse areas as ecology, epidemiology, finance, the Internet, terrorism, and international relations. They have been successfully modeled in ecology in the context of complex adaptive systems: systems made up of individual agents, whose interactions have macroscopic consequences that feed back to influence individual behavior. While acknowledging challenges, this paper argues for the value of applying to societal systems the approaches that natural scientists have developed in quantifying and modeling biological interactions and ecosystems.
This brief argues for the importance of improving our understanding of what influences will to fight, and it describes two models for doing so: one for analyzing a military unit's will to fight, and one for analyzing a nation's will to fight.
Overview The U.S. military, under the guidance of the Secretary of Defense, is moving toward a new concept of military planning and operations that is agile and adaptable to the conflict at hand. The aim is to develop capabilities that can rapidly break an adversary's will to fight and undermine the utility of asymmetric capabilities. The new concept called effects-based operations (EBO) encompasses processes, tools, and organizations that focus on planning, executing, and assessing military activities for the effects produced rather than merely tallying the number of targets destroyed. EBO practitioners draw on the full range of instruments of national power to anticipate, track, and understand the indirect as well as direct effects of U.S. actions throughout the enemy political, military, and economic systems. The EBO concept requires deep knowledge not only of enemy but also of friendly capabilities and structures. The current suite of analytic tools employed by the Department of Defense cannot support this approach to military operations. These tools were not designed to determine how the use of force affects adversary strategic will, to model adaptive behavior, to represent unintended consequences, or to evaluate alternative courses of action that include other instruments of national power beyond military force. During the Cold War, the dominant principle of military planning was the ability to mass forces at key points while preventing the adversary from doing the same. Success in battle was understood to depend on the ability to dominate the enemy in an extended attrition campaign. However, the operations that the U.S. military has been called on to execute have changed in character. They are typically against opponents who have nowhere near the military might of the United States (let alone the United States with its allies), and they are not limited to the classic cross-border invasion that leads to defined battle lines, with success measured by territory defended or gained. As demonstrated by Operation Allied Force in Kosovo and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, considerations of military superiority at strategic or operational levels are inappropriate when compared with other factors, such as the enemy's will to fight and local considerations of military force that allow for asymmetric capabilities to be employed effectively. The new concept of effects-based operations (EBO) is an effort to leverage American military and technical might with enormous advantages in computation, information, and analysis to achieve political-military outcomes that so far have eluded the United States in the new strategic environment. Making EBO a reality will depend on developing and using appropriate analytic frameworks of political and military problems. These frameworks and associated methodologies will enable commanders to plan more effectively for operations and then adapt those plans and operations as political and military situations unfold. Future operations that reflect the principles of EBO will require U.S. political and military leadership to understand the consequences of what may occur in the future beyond immediate military activities. Political and military decisionmakers will require a modeling framework that integrates concepts such as the explicit linking of military actions to national strategy, the continual assessment of operational outcomes and unintended consequences, the coordination of interagency efforts, and the appropriate utilization of emerging operational concepts such as network-centric warfare and rapid decisive operations. EBO seeks to control the duration and scale of a conflict, allowing the state to achieve strategic objectives at an acceptable cost. Efforts to achieve the desired effects are pursued under the dual objectives of operational efficiency and political effectiveness. Under EBO, commanders would not commit to operations that squander precious resources, nor would they undertake actions without a likelihood of success; for example, they would not commit to a strategy of deterrence against an adversary intent on fighting regardless of the potential costs or loss. …
Social movement research is becoming increasingly important, as information and communications technologies (ICTs) have altered the ways movements form, organize, mobilize, and act, as well as the ways in which they are surveilled and disrupted. The authors of this report explore the use of agent-based modeling as a method for studying the effects of ICTs on the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social movements over time.
Abstract : The Pre-Conflict Management Tools (PCMT) Program was developed to transform how intelligence analysts, policy analysts, operational planners, and decisionmakers interact when confronting highly complex strategic problems. The PCMT Program capitalizes on technologies and methods that help users collect, process, perform analyses with large quantities of data, and employ computational modeling and simulation methods to determine the probability and likelihood of state failure. The Program's computational decision aids and planning methodology help policymakers and military planners devise activities that can mitigate the consequences of civil war, or prevent state failure altogether. State failure has become an increasingly important national and international security issue since the end of the Cold War. Weak and failed states establish a nexus of interests between global terrorism, embattled leaders or insurgents, and large populations easily mobilized by a combination of violent ideology and economic opportunity. Civil war, the most common form of armed conflict around the world, undermines regional and international stability and catalyzes larger national security problems, such as weapons proliferation, organized crime, and terrorism. The PCMT Program builds on social science research on state failure and conflict, by turning government users into consumers of social science models employed by academic researchers and validated through peer review processes and implementation by practitioners. By constructing an analytic suite out of existing models, the Program avoids the controversies of 1960's social science research programs, such as Project Camelot, by rejecting the notion of a single, government-sponsored theory of conflict or placing policymakers in the position of determining what is or is not valid social science.
Drawing from subject-matter expertise, a literature analysis, and a tabletop exercise, the authors highlight key insights about the ongoing defense analytic problem and its enduring challenges. The authors propose analytic and programmatic frameworks to explore potential cost-per-effect measures, assess those measures with an enterprise cost-effectiveness approach, and chart a roadmap to include a joint focus in future Air Force decisionmaking.
This report is a compendium of expert insights regarding opportunities for investing in science and technology to increase U.S. ability to engage in long-term competition in undergoverned spaces. This exploration marks an initial step toward developing a functional perspective on determining whether new approaches to strategy and engagement are warranted, and what the implications of those steps might be.
