Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 39

COMPLEX WORLD

(Photo illustration by Michael Hogg)

understanding for the commander and the organization is a core intelligence function, but the Army’s
current intelligence doctrine is too myopic and rigid to
support commanders in this regard.
For the Army, the current default analytical model
for generating understanding and supporting the
military decision making process is intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB), defined by the U.S. Army
as “the systematic process of analyzing the mission
variables of enemy, terrain, weather, and civil considerations in an area of interest to determine their effect
on operations.”4
By virtue of being an analytical model, IPB eliminates consideration of certain paradigms while
restricting the framing of thinking upfront in order
to produce consistent and predictable results under
specified conditions. One resulting fundamental problem with using IPB in the COE is that it was designed
for well-structured problems of the past and not the
“wicked problems” of today.5 In other words, IPB was
designed to support commanders against a relatively
well-known enemy in a conventional combined arms
maneuver fight. In such a capacity, IPB served the
Army exceptionally well.
However, as intelligence professionals look out
into today’s sea of uncertainty and increasingly
complex environments, they must ask themselves if
IPB—their primary modus operandi—is best suited
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

to support commanders operating in the COE. IPB
is, at best, suboptimal for employment in complex
environments because it is conventional-enemy
centric and fails to contextualize environmental
variables over time, thereby potentially concealing
the root causes of conflict and instability. Better
alternatives to IPB are systemic operational design
or similar systems theory approaches because they
focus on environmental systems. Such alternative
approaches give the commander and organization a
more in-depth understanding of the operating environment and problem than does IPB.
To put this is in mathematical terms, IPB solves for x
and design solves for y. Therefore, it makes little sense to
attempt to solve for y using the x model.
To draw on the work of English philosopher Karl
Popper, his analogy between “clouds” and “clocks” illustrates the point.6 Popper asserted that the world was
broken down into two categories, clouds and clocks.
Clocks are well-defined and systematic, and are easily
disassembled and reduced to parts. One result is that,
most often, there are correct, well-defined solutions for
repairing or maintaining clocks.
On the other hand, clouds are amorphous, messy,
and ill-defined. Compared to the predictable functions
produced by the precision construction of clocks, clouds
cannot be disassembled in any similar way to clocks and
are highly unpredictable.
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