Situation management in counter-insurgency operations: An overview of operational art and relevant technologies

Understanding the concept of employment (COE) for Information Fusion or other analysis/decision-aiding technology is key to the evaluation of its effectiveness; this paper studies and characterizes the COE for Counterinsurgency applications as drawn from open literature and some interchanges with U.S. Army staff. Managing and executing Counterinsurgency (COIN) situations is complicated business. Collectively, the broad elements of the decision-action space can be broken into “direct” and “indirect” classes of actions, where direct actions are those focused on insurgent force structure in the traditional military sense, and indirect actions those focused on undermining support to the insurgents while simultaneously attacking them militarily. Invoking military doctrine dating from the ideas of a French general in the 1800's, the US Army has developed a response framework involving various “Lines of Effort” and the notions of Effects-Based Operations to achieve behavioral changes in insurgents as Desired Effects as regards the indirect operations. By and large the situation management framework requires consideration of notions of Complex Adaptive Systems; the paper will make remarks about this SIMA-CAS context. Intelligence support to this Operational Doctrine requires capabilities in Hard and Soft Fusion technology, methods of Influence Networks, Petri Nets, Sequential Decision Making under Extreme Uncertainty, and Model Predictive Control, among other technologies. This paper will provide an overview of the concepts of the operational doctrine itself and the employment of these technologies in this modern-day military operational doctrine for the Counterinsurgency domain.