Bob:

Right. Counter Terrorism is about threat assessments. No doubt, there is an enemy, real or imagined, under every rock and behind every tree.

COIN, to the extent it involves understanding, control and or changing the land, its people and activities, requires understand them---and it gets pretty broad (and ill-defined).

Appropriate intelligence for COIN is, necessarily, about the land and people, and not the enemy.

The kinds of basic CIMS data appropriate for assessing the land and people is different, and needs to be created to get an appropriate operating picture.

We faced this problem in Iraq in 2008, and dealt with it on an ad hoc basis. Now, for Afghanistan, the request is a bit more formal.

But, underneath this immediate report for Afghanistan, and the ad hoc solutions for Iraq, is the fundamental question about the current intel foundation.

If it was the wrong tool for Iraq and Afghanistan, where else is it wrong.

My guess is that, like the miser who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, we have exhaustively evaluated the threat of everything, but missed substantial alternative analyses and opportunities.

Was the real point of MG Flynn's report to decsribe another ad hoc fix, or to advice the outside world of a systemic problem that needed to be resolved?

I believe it was the latter, but, as you suggest, it may not be very well accepted, or adopted.

Not every system is capable of learning. We know the military does (even if it stumbles around sometimes before it gets there). But...

Steve