Targeting

[Bill Moore]

Hey Slapout, I'm sorry buddy, but I'm not taking my poms poms out of the closet yet. This topic is worth signficant discussion and debate, but I'll be short on time for the next few weeks, but here is a quick response.

First, you said the enemy is a system. O.K. we can say the enemy is a system, the enemy is a network, the enemy is a group of people, the enemy is nation, all are perceptional models to help us understand the problem. The problem is if we use the wrong perceptional model we misrepresent the problem, and thus develop the wrong strategy, but I digress.

Let's use the system model (note you can perceive systems in a number of ways). If the enemy is a nation-state such as Germany during WWII, then the nation is the ultimate the system we want to target. The nation is a system composed of several subsystems (economic, political, social, defense, legal, etc.) that interact with one another in various ways. Using the example provided by W Owen of a German Infantry Division, the Inf Div "could" be classifed as a node of a component (Infantry) of a subsystem (Army) of a subsystem (defense) of a system (Germany). Framing it this way, it would seem apparent that the loss of a division was simply the loss of a node of a component two subsystems down from the over archng system, so the effect while painful wouldn't be decisive in itself. If we destroyed all the nodes, that would cause the Infantry subsystem to collapse, which would make the rest of the Army system much less effective, thereby weakening the nation state system. That is one way to look at it, but I think it is a stretch. I think it can argued there are effects derived from destroying this node that are acculmative in nature on the nation's morale that the system model doesn't address. On the other hand, where the system approach may have made a difference was if we went after Germany's ability to generate electric power, we would have crippled their industrial production capacity, which many German officers thought would have ended the war two years earlier.

I agree that presenting problems as systems so we can understand them may be useful for certain situations, but I also think using the system paradigm has serious limitations, especially when applied to insurgencies, Al Qaeda networks, and the drug cartels. Of course it does have "some" use, but Warden's five ring model will not provide us with sufficient understanding of the problem set to develop a comprehensive strategy. We have tried this approach numerous times throughout history to no avail, as this is the American way of war (or the industrialist way of war). I guess you could argue we were doing it wrong (perhaps), but you can also argue that this approach while useful is not a targeting pancea, and it doesn't come close to providing a complete strategy for defeating the enemy. I think we should apply multiple models to the same problem set to see what we come up with, use Warden's system approach, use PMESII analysis, use ASCOPE, and others, all provide a different way to understand the problem and factors influencing the problem(s).