Military Intelligence Fusion for Complex Operations

In the hostile, complex, and chaotic counterinsurgency environment, people can support the government and the insurgency to varying degrees at the same time — and be similarly resentful of both. Identifying all but the unequivocally irredeemable as an "enemy" and labeling anyone wearing a government uniform as a "friend" not only creates a false paradigm of human identity, but it also artificially bounds the U.S. military's options for influencing a population during a counterinsurgency operation. Analyzing complex environments, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, through simplified approaches that incorporate color-coding and enforce a strict division of analytic specialties can lead analysts to make unhelpful and logically unsound assumptions about human identity. Color-coded, enemy-centric analyses also reinforce the inaccurate and unhelpful notion that the enemy and society are separate constructs in the counterinsurgency environment, or separate subsystems (or groups) within a larger societal system. On the contrary, what is needed is an all-source, holistic, fused approach to analysis that takes into account sociocultural ambiguities. This paper proposes a paradigm shift in how intelligence is combined for analysis and how the product of that analysis can provide a more complete picture of counterinsurgency operations for commanders and other decisionmakers. The concept of behavioral intelligence analysis discards the old method of color-coding in favor of a spectrum of hostility. In other words, analysts would work from the assumption that all actors might have the capacity to behave in a way that is more or less conducive to the U.S. military's objectives in a conflict.