Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 41

COMPLEX WORLD

(Photo by Ashraf Shazly, Agence France-Presse)

Insurgent fighters belonging to the Justice and Equality Movement ( JEM), a rebel group in Sudan’s Darfur conflict, await orders circa 2011. JEM
claims that its main objective is to overthrow the current Sudanese dictatorship, which governs under Islamic law, and establish in its place a
democratic state that respects the rights of Sudan’s women and diverse ethnic groups. However, the conflict is characterized by other observers
as having much more complex roots, a clash between Arab and diverse non-Arab ethnicities vying for control of land and resources.

counterproductive to developing accurate knowledge
and understanding of core issues and the enemy.
In known environments characterized by conventional enemies, IPB is a fantastic tool for systematically identifying mission variables which, when applied to a template,
can provide indicators and warnings of enemy intentions
and activities—clock problems.10 Unfortunately, in unknown environments (ill-structured, or cloud problems)
that have no templates, IPB products become random,
uncontextualized information and data points. From this,
it is easy to see how the value of IPB begins to diminish as
the level of complexity increases.11
IPB falls short with regard to unearthing the
unknown nature and character of instability and
conflict because IPB is enemy-centric and parochial.
It presupposes there is a unified “enemy/threat” in the
traditional sense, which then becomes the primary
focus of the commander. However, it is conceivable
that in a given complex operating environment there
is no “enemy,” only conditions or systems that require
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

adjustment to solve the problem and accomplish the
mission. Therefore, in such contexts, IPB would fail to
reveal root causes of problems or show relationships
between variables because IPB’s enemy/threat perspective would restrict and inhibit full understanding of
complex situations.
IPB also comes up short temporally; it is not well
suited to detect changes in the environment and
human domain. In military operations among populations, tracking the evolution and character of the
conflict is a priority information requirement for any
commander. Maj. Scott Stafford captured the point in
an article when he wrote, “Today’s enemy is just as likely to be yesterday’s or tomorrow’s friend,” and “success
or failure, tactical or strategic, depends on the Army’s
ability to anticipate and shape how people and their
identity groups perceive military missions in relations
to their interests, and what they do about it.”12
Obtaining the kind of information Stafford specifies as vital to success is rarely a priority and, in my
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