Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
Colonel John Warden's use of five concentric rings to represent relative importance of targets associated with each ring from inner to outer as Leadership, System Essentials, Infrastructure, Population, and last the Fielded Military is an arbitrary model that has two fatal flaws.

First, it ignores the enemy—in Clausewitzian speak it ignores the “clash of wills”; the enemy always gets a vote, so targeting only five elements in a rigid prioritized format allows the enemy to take advantage of our predictability and does not provide for those enemies (like al Qaeda) who refuse to organize to support this model.

Second and more critically, the Warden five rings model does not support achieving the political goal. Colonel Warden tells us always to target these same five categories irrespective to the political goal.

Major Bill Jakola
Hi Bill,
Point 1: Glad you brought that up because this where most people get stuck.......You never ever just choose one ring!!!! You want to attack all 5 if possible. You want to attack the Whole System in Parallel for the simple reason that the enemy will respond....in an uncertain environment and unpredictable environment.......so your best option to reduce the uncertainty is to attack the whole system and reduce his future options.

Point 2: It assumes the Politcal Objective will be given to the military arm of government at which time you choose military targets that will support the Polical Objective. Which is step one of his system "Design The Future".