Targeting

[slapout9]

Excellent paper on how Warden's Rings can be used to Target any organization.


Urban Warfare at the Operational Level: Identifying COG's and Key Nodes.

http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=...fier=ADA397036

[slapout9]

5 Rings Targeting of a terrorist organization. Absolutely one of the best papers on Warden's theory and how it can be applied to any organization. Warden left as commandant of the Air Command and Staff College in 96 and this is one of the last really good papers on his theory. After this period things started to switch to EBO theory and have not really done that well since then. Chapter 3 has the targeting scheme that nearly 10 years later the Grubbs article brings up ("Is There a deep fight in COIN "posted earlier on this thread). As so often happens with theories they get changed when they just really need to be understood. The amazing thing is that an Airman wrote this and it is as valid today as it was then if not more so.


http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0393.pdf

[William F. Owen]

5 Rings Targeting of a terrorist organization.


http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0393.pdf

Well I'll give it a look, but I am very doubtful, because:

a>) The RAF is trying to claim some insights into COIN, which are just woeful and play very fast and loose with the historical record to try and support their arguments.

b>) I think the overwhelming lesson of the 2nd Lebanon War is that Air Power has extremely limited utility in COIN, as concerns "kinetic" effects. The RAF is actually now trying to claim that AIR POWER did not fail in the Lebanon, but that it was given an impossible task, thus did not fail, per se.

c>) I also suspect that there are some very unhealthy pre-emptive USAF agendas in play in this paper.

[slapout9]

Here is a PDF file on how CARVER can be adapted to almost to any situation. This one is CARVER+Shock used in the food industry. The first time I saw this in LE was with the NYPD some years back. This should be an Interagency Gold Standard right after the 5 Rings IMHO.



http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/Carver.pdf

[Eden]

Generally, I'm all for piling on whenever EBO is criticized, but after a tour as a planner I've realized a few things.

1. In its essence, EBO (or EBP or EBAO or whatever the acronym consultants are using now) is a useful tool in planning. We've been doing it for years; artillerymen, like Proust's gentleman, were pleased to discover they had been using it for decades when they asked us whether we wanted to "neutralize", "suppress", or "destroy" a particular target. In concept, it is much like backward planning. I know where I want to be at the end of the operation; how do I get there? Personally, I found it to be a good way to recharge my planning brain cells and incorporate innovative thinking.

So, what's the problem?

2. It is not moron-friendly. Many officers I worked with were unable to articulate feasible, definable, measurable effects, let alone figure out what "causes" needed to be employed to bring them about. When you add in unintended effects, second and third order effects, etc., you quickly develop migraine headaches and intellectual shutdown amongst your staff. In other words, effects-based planning is hugely difficult, especially in hideously complex environments such as your average COIN op.

3. It has been hijacked by knuckleheads and LOM-scroungers. Whereas early works on the subject suggested that EBO might be a nice way to approach problem solving and an aid in planning, its recent enshrinement in the buzzword pantheon has effectively crippled its utility. We have taken an interesting idea and transformed it into a panoply of spreadsheets, bullet points, MOPs, MOEs, mandatory annexes, and new staff sections. As one who has waded through charts of desired effects, sub-effects, sub-sub effects, and apparently randomly-selected (see para 2, above) actions, methods, enabling tasks, etc., ad nauseum, I can testify that EBO are already as dysfunctional as IPB ultimately became. Unfortunately, EBO is a perfect catalyst for our proclivities toward endless analysis, false precision, and overornamentation.

4. It is often dominated by targeteers, artillerymen, and bomber pilots, none of whom are noted as a class for their excellence in strategic planning. As a result, we have too often replaced meaningful campaign plans with target lists. In the end we chase targets rather than our chosen end-state.

It's too late to stuff the genie back in the bottle, guys. The only way to escape the insidious uses to which this good idea is being used is through education and professional discussion. Or maybe we could come up with a new buzzword. But what would be the second and third order effects...

[Ken White]

the process confirmed my suspicion:

Violations of K.I.S.S. are not advisable; or "We can overcomplexificate ANYthing..."

[slapout9]

It's too late to stuff the genie back in the bottle, guys. The only way to escape the insidious uses to which this good idea is being used is through education and professional discussion. Or maybe we could come up with a new buzzword. But what would be the second and third order effects...

Maybe not, since General Mattis took over JFC the handbook on the Effects Based Approach has been pulled

It is also nice to have someone agree with me because I have been saying this since I got here and I learned EBO (wasn't called that then) as it was taught to LE to attack drug gangs. Although that has been several years now I have never talked about it in detail except to commnet on articles because I am not sure of the current OPSEC rules, but if you want to know just how powerfull this type of planning can be read "Killing Pabelo" by Mark Bowden how he got away with saying what he did I don't know but the detail is amazing. I posted a page number from the book on another thread that gives almost a perfect 5 rings analysis of what to hit and how to hit IF!!!! your really want to win.

[Bill Moore]

Slapout I find myself in disagreement with you, which is out of character, since I am normally a cheerleader for your posts. The mnemonic CARVER has been around for over 50 years. I was taught it was developed by the OSS during WWII, and it was called CRAVER (a french verb), because it was developed to assist the French underground in determining the best targets to hit based on their capabilities and desired results. I have found it to be very useful over the years. My heartburn with the use of CARVER is based on two concerns:

First, I'm troubled with our persistant effort to quantify everything. Not all the factors in CARVER can be "accurately" quantified, so the highest sum of each proposed target will not always (and usually doesn't) equate to the target you deisre to hit based on logic and experience; however, since our officers need metrics for everything, the operator must adjust his numbers, so the target he wants to hit has the highest sum. In short we're spinning our wheels trying to quantify each factor, yet the important thing is to "consider" and think each factor through.

Second, and much more serious, is the attempt to apply CARVER to insurgencies and terrorist groups as an effective tool to identify the "silver bullet" solution. This is complete hogwash, insurgencies are complex social networks or movements, and there is no silver bullet solution or shock and awe effect that will equate to victory. CARVER was defined for simple networks, such as a power plant, where hitting gadet X will predictably result in Y. You cannot conduct targeting of human nodes and expect to have a predictable result. Social networks will readjust and keep on ticking, as we seem to painfully relearn each time we get into one of these conflicts. As a matter of fact, after Pablo was killed, the Columbia drug cartels became more decentralized and exported more crap to the U.S. than they did when Pablo was alive. I'm not arguing that killing Plabo was a bad thing, but it was simply justice, not a decisive victory.

Targeting stupid is an attempt to define all our security challenges as targets. We simply can't dumb our problems down to targets. Targets will remain part of the solution, but winning insurgencies requires creating desired effects and avoided undesired effects. Winning requires winning over the support of the population, isolating the insurgent from the population, and neutralizing the insurgent infrastructure. CARVER doesn't facilitate this, effects based thinking does. EBO targeting doesn't facilitate this, effects based thinking does.

EBO targeting is a terrible concept, because EBO shouldn't be linked with targeting. Targeting should remain traditional targeting, where we apply lethal fires to create the specific effects that lethal or destructive fires can create, but the main effort in COIN, and even the so called drug war, isn't targeting. It is much more complex than that, yet we're always striving for a simple answer and that frequently takes us down the wrong road.

CARVER is an outstanding tool for what it was designed to do, but it has limited use in countering insurgencies.