Since 2001, the United States with its coalition partners have not enjoyed operational or strategic success in wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. There have been tactical successes, but often those successes have been a contributing factor to operational failure as military leaders ignore their counterinsurgency doctrine, striving to conduct major combat actions. A key contributor in Western failure has been the lack of integration of operations and intelligence in conventional forces. Intelligence is necessary to create knowledge that leads to the discovery of the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities. Integration of operations and intelligence ensures that knowledge is transferred so that critical vulnerabilities can be attacked and destroyed in
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Yet, that is not our approach, and there are two elements to this issue. The first is the disproportionate effort to the collection of information compared to analysis and the second is the appropriate investment in the organizations that enables the knowledge environment, the intelligence centers. An example of the collection paradigm can be seen in the current war in Iraq. Thousands of people and hundreds of aircraft are provided for the tasks to conduct the counter-land battle. According to the Washington Times, in the first four months of 2015 in the war in Iraq, 7,319 sorties were flown of which 1,859 included at least one weapon release (Kilmas 2015). Currently, the emphasis is on flying aircraft rather than finding the enemy. While our aircraft can deliver munitions with high accuracy and they can collect and process a significant amount of tactical information these capabilities cannot be put to use due to a lack of processing capability for battlefield intelligence (Kilmas 2015). While the situation appears dire in that only 25% of aircraft were able to engage the enemy, the reality is even worse. Less that two percent of the missions were deliberately planned against enemy high-value targets. Most of the sorties where weapons were dropped, the engagement was not based on intelligence. The critical issue is finding the target and then deciding how to best influence that target. Both of these functions require a substantial investment in
Yet, that is not our approach, and there are two elements to this issue. The first is the disproportionate effort to the collection of information compared to analysis and the second is the appropriate investment in the organizations that enables the knowledge environment, the intelligence centers. An example of the collection paradigm can be seen in the current war in Iraq. Thousands of people and hundreds of aircraft are provided for the tasks to conduct the counter-land battle. According to the Washington Times, in the first four months of 2015 in the war in Iraq, 7,319 sorties were flown of which 1,859 included at least one weapon release (Kilmas 2015). Currently, the emphasis is on flying aircraft rather than finding the enemy. While our aircraft can deliver munitions with high accuracy and they can collect and process a significant amount of tactical information these capabilities cannot be put to use due to a lack of processing capability for battlefield intelligence (Kilmas 2015). While the situation appears dire in that only 25% of aircraft were able to engage the enemy, the reality is even worse. Less that two percent of the missions were deliberately planned against enemy high-value targets. Most of the sorties where weapons were dropped, the engagement was not based on intelligence. The critical issue is finding the target and then deciding how to best influence that target. Both of these functions require a substantial investment in