Operationalizing The Jones Model through COG

[jcustis]

Quote:
Originally Posted by jcustis

Great observations that play into my own struggle to define area denial. Reading your points brings home the fact that despite all the collections assets we have at our disposal, that harness military manpower, very few of them (at least that I can tell) are focused on identifying the root causes of why knuckleheads do what they do.

One place to start might be to question the knucklehead assumption.

Of course some of them may be exactly that: testosterone-addled young men just looking for a fight. In some cultures young men are expected to prove themselves by fighting, and it’s possible that some of them are fighting us just because we’re there, and if we weren’t there they’d be fighting the tribe on the other side of the hill.

There may be other factors involved also. I’ve said this before, but I think failure of government to deliver services or development is overrated as a cause of insurgency, especially in areas where people have very low expectations of government. People are more likely to fight because of anger or fear: either something has been done to them that they didn’t like, or they expect something to be done that they won’t like.

There’s also the foreigner factor. What would happen if some vastly superior power sent an army to our country, removed our government, installed a new one, and told us that it was henceforth our duty to support that government, and if we failed in that duty we would be called “insurgents”? I may be wrong, but I kind of suspect that a few of the people on this forum might be tempted in such circumstances to do a bit of fighting.

In any event, if we want to get people to stop fighting without having to kill them all, figuring out why they are fighting is a reasonable first step, and it’s also worth looking for divergence between the local narrative of resistance and the insurgent ideology.

After cruising through this thread more than once, I sat down with our task force's intelligence officer and began to ping him on this issue of why. We began to go around and around in response to my questions of why certain actors in the battlespace were doing what they were doing, and he quickly grew tired of me telling him that he was defining the symptons of the environment and the behaviors themselves, but very little of the true reason why it was happening.

After that, I tool a look at the priority intelligence requirements that are laid out. Not surprisingly, not a single PIR asked the question "why?"

I am pretty much smacking myself on the forehead with the realization that the only way we can actually attack the system and problem, comes from understanding that simple three-letter word.

[Dayuhan]

After that, I tool a look at the priority intelligence requirements that are laid out. Not surprisingly, not a single PIR asked the question "why?"

I am pretty much smacking myself on the forehead with the realization that the only way we can actually attack the system and problem, comes from understanding that simple three-letter word.

It's a tough question, especially since the answer can vary from place to place and person to person... that doesn't make it any less important!