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Indications and Warning (I&W)- Gordon Housworth [ 11/11/2006 - 16:02 ] # Part 1
Central to the CENTCOM Indications & Warning (I&W) validate Iraqi civil war, Indications and Warning (I&W) form an essential element of military Information Warfare (IW) along with attack and defense capabilities, targeting, and battle damage assessment (BDA). I&W affects far more than military operations and Operations Other Than War (OOTW), a notable example being the CERT Coordination Center dealing with vulnerability and incident analysis, and enterprise survivability in the face of computer security threats. I&W is central to predictive analysis yet is too often missing in commercial risk analysis. Indications are observables of an evolving system that is only partially revealed to the analyst, e.g., fast breaking, fragmentary news. Only when the system is fully revealed are Indications understood in terms of their individual cause and effect, e.g., an After Action Report or the historical record. Too often do I see Indications listed as a checklist, stripped of their systems context without the means to value one Indication above others for a particular analysis. This note speaks to themes I think critical to good I&W analysis. FM 34-1, dtd Jan 94 defines Indicator as:
Neil Garra runs a colorful but useful site for the S2, or intelligence officer, that will give you the basics here and here. Then look at State Collapse and Ethnic Violence: Toward a Predictive Model. I tilt to the view shared by many terrorism analysts that terrorism presents an especially difficult challenge to the intel community, a challenge marked by lack of massively better humint and the contextual understanding of local conditions to interpret that humint. I believe that the challenge can benefit from better analytic tools, but nothing can substitute for a competent analyst capable of non-linear thinking with an eye for the outlier datum. Analytics that blunt that ability lead to disaster. The Military Intelligence Officer Basic Course describes the difficulty in predictive analysis: The challenge of predictive analysis is that it is both difficult and risky. The Military Intelligence Officer must stretch his or her intellectual resources to the limit to conduct predictive analysis, and still runs the risk that events predicted will not come to pass. This difficulty and risk apply less to the production of capabilities intelligence. As a consequence, there is a tendency to avoid predictive analysis and stick to beancounting. The bottom line, however, is the Commander needs to know enemy intentions as well as enemy capabilities [especially so] when the Commander initiates an action or when the enemy poses a vital threat to friendly forces. Never easy in combat operations, successful prediction demands even more attentive analysis in Operations Other Than War (OOTW) as there is either too much or too little data, i.e., too many dots or not enough dots to define a pattern changing over time. The enemy of good I&W, Denial and Deception are almost always present to confuse the opponent's analysis. Here is a summary of deception tactics and strategies, with some thoughts on counter-deception drawn from the 2004 US election campaigns:
The centrality of Boyd's OODA Loop Indications are generally perishable and demand a high clockspeed in order to get ahead of the adversary's planning - and in Iraq that is often multiple adversaries, each pursuing their own agenda and targets. The I&W cycle must contract so that it operates inside the adversaries timing, otherwise you are in the business of Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA), a nasty catch-up game. LTIOV, or Latest Time Information of Value, takes on new meaning. One of the best examples that both defines and explains the use of the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop in a fluid 4GW environment is Fourth Generation Warfare & OODA Loop Implications of The Iraqi Insurgency. Systems mindset and mental models All analysts should study Russ Ackoff. Start here and dig deeper: Applying Ackoff's rules of system interdependency, Part I and Ackoff on Reductionism and Expansionism, Part II. The Berlin Wisdom Model describes a knowledge gaining process essential to an analyst. Analysts are often required to make sense of a system of which they have an insufficient understanding. They often lack an awareness of the most appropriate mental model, formal or informal, by which to study it. Commenting on the evolving nature of modeling systems, Coensys' Chadna wrote:
The changing nature and subtlety of Indications Back to the Basic Course, Indictations in OOTW are "observable or discernible actions that confirm or deny enemy capabilities and intentions" divided into a hierarchy of:
If it were only so easy. Paramilitaries and autonomous, loosely coupled groups can assemble without the logistics and maneuver tail common to conventional combat forces. And when the adversary's weapons are common task to task, it is difficult to isolate preparatory indicators that tell the analyst "specifically what is being trained or what equipment the threat is being trained to use." They get it more correct in defining the secondary indicators as the disappearance of things, i.e., things or personnel have gone missing (We love to say that, "The Hole is as good as the Donut.") and "intangibles such as fear or joy among the population." They get it right in noting that the "analysis of secondary indicators [requires] in-depth knowledge of the local culture, habits and customs and must also take into consideration history, society, geography and climate to fully understand their importance or value." And we sent brigade after brigade into Iraq without so much language training as to say hello in Arabic. Worse, units often called their Arab US nationals acting as translators, sand niggers. Whoops. Part 3 to follow, Too small, too few, too sparse, too irregular, too contextual CYBER SIGNAL/NOISE CHARACTERISTICS AND SENSOR MODELS FOR EARLY CYBER INDICATIONS AND WARNING An OODA Loop Writ Large - 4GW and the Iraq War Fourth Generation Warfare & OODA Loop Implications of The Iraqi Insurgency INDICATIONS & WARNING POST 9/11: NEW STRATEGIES IN INTELLIGENCE Homeland Security: Intelligence Indications and Warning Neil Garra The S2 Company Focusing Intelligence part 2 THREAT WARNING FOR AMERICA'S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE: Conflict Avoidance and Resolution Through Information Peacekeeping Toward a Functional Model of Information Warfare State Collapse and Ethnic Violence: Toward a Predictive Model Parameters, Spring 1996, pp. 19-31 Employment of Indications and Warning Intelligence Methods to Forecast a Potentially Hostile Revolution in Military Affairs. Military Intelligence Officer Basic Course Gordon Housworth InfoT Public Strategic Risk Public Terrorism Public |
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