To me the biggest thing that intel supports is making the right decisions at the right times for the right reasons to create the right effects.

Blow stuff up? We know the calculus on that.

Population-centric warfare, where the population is not an inherent component of the enemy, but the environment in which he operates? I'm not sure we know what the "right" effects are, and some of the answers that we're pretty sure are right we (honestly) don't have the stomach for.


Until we know what the right effects are, we can't begin to define what tools can be used to create those effects.

Until we know what tools we can use, we don't know what the contraints are within which we can operate.

Until we know what the constraints are, we don't know what information we do/don't need to make the right decisions on implementation of tools for the purposes of creating the effects we desire.


Someone *really* needs to start with the effects and work backwards from that.


The Map-HT tools are a set of population-focused tools that are designed to offer a robust picture of the "green COP" and not just an S2/S3 'maneuver-focused' SITREP. There's a lot more that can be handled in that toolkit and it colors shades of gray for the commander quite nicely. More to the point - it forces the collectors/assessors to spend time digging for real information to support the non-kinetic analysts rather than just rolling into town and counting AK47s on a drive-by basis. It gets the non-kinetic questions out of the S2's hands and into the S9 where they belong.

All that said, until you can answer the questions about effects, it's just collecting data to collect data, so that criticism is spot-on.