Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 91

Social Factors and the
Human Domain
Maj. Brian Hildebrand, U.S. Army National Guard

T

he Army conducts operations through mission
command.1 Both as a warfighting function and
a philosophy, leaders use mission command to
project military might in order to achieve political and
military objectives. Exercised in the context of strategic
landpower, mission command helps to create conditions
favorable for defeating an enemy or stabilizing a region.2
Wrought in conjunction with leader development, mission command exploits the potential, knowledge, and experience of each soldier to attain operational and tactical
success.3 Yet, no matter how it is used, mission command
is tied to the human domain.
The concept that war is a human endeavor has endured through many epochs.4 While Clausewitz famously casts, “War is merely the continuation of policy by
other means,” there is no denying the fact that at its core,
war is human.5 However, a complete comprehension of
the human domain may never be achieved due to complexity stemming from the enigmatic nature of humanity
itself. The works of twentieth-century American pragmatist John Dewey provide some insight. Dewey reflects on
experience, daily life, the correlation between knowledge
and action, and values in order to increase awareness of
the human domain. Furthermore, he suggests, “all deliberate, all planned human conduct, personal and collective,
seems to be influenced, if not controlled, by estimates of
value or worth of ends to be attained.”6
Applying this insight to practical employment of
mission command, success depends at every echelon on
leaders using mission command to affect the human domain. How exactly the Army uses decisive action through

mission command to win relies heavily on the ability of
its leaders to integrate techniques for analyzing different
aspects of the human domain into the military decision
making process (MDMP) to achieve understanding. This
article describes one such technique.

Another Mission Analysis Tool
Translating Dewey’s insights into a framework for
understanding the human domain is a challenge because
values differ from one society to the next, are influenced
by culture, and change over time. Yet, leaders and soldiers
need something to lend context and coherence to the
observations, knowledge, experience, and intuition they
have pertaining to the diverse societies in which they perform missions. A common framework, once devised, can
be used as part of mission analysis to increase the shared
understanding by the organization as a whole.
Why another mission analysis tool? As depicted in
figure 1 (page 90), the current mission analysis tools are
used for different applications at each level of planning:
strategic, operational, and tactical. At the strategic level,
planners use DIMEFIL (diplomacy, information, military, economics, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement) to provide an analysis framework. At the operational level, planners use PMESII-PT (political, military,
economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment, and time). PMESII was first designed by joint
planners and introduced in the Commander’s Handbook
for an Effects-Based Approach to Joint Operations in 2006.7
The Army later added PT in 2008 when it published FM
3-0, Operations.8 METT-TC (mission, enemy, terrain and

LEFT: Egyptian soldiers on top of an armored vehicle join pro-democracy supporters in prayer during an anti-government rally 25 February 2011 in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. Hundreds of Egyptians attended the rally, calling for an end to a long-running state of emergency
and demanding that the Egyptian cabinet step down.
(Photo by Peter Andrews, Reuters)

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