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.