[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Targeting: An Exercise in Generating Intelligence Requirements I was talking with a new acquaintance about intelligence support to targeting and why I don’t say much about it or the targeting cycle. There may not be any good reason why I don’t talk about targeting so we’ll start with some practical homework that exercises the fundamentals of the Intelligence Cycle. (For a refresher on Intelligence Requirements, see Generating and Managing Intelligence Requirements and NBPP: Published Intelligence Requirements.) In one sentence, Intelligence Requirements direct collection and they’re absolutely critical to any intelligence operation. The tactical intelligence needs in any shooting conflict are going to be two-fold: targeting bad guys in the immediate- and near-term and supporting operational planning and assessing the enemy’s degradation/disposition in the mid- to long-term. The most cherished three words for us in Iraq and Afghanistan – Find, Fix, Finish – have been around since at least Vietnam. Since the mid-2000s, those three letters have turned into a conglomerate of other letters that more accurately describes what actually happens – Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate (F3EAD). Finishing the enemy is simply not enough. Through tactical site exploitation, we’re able to find potentially lots of information that leads to producing actionable intelligence. General Stanley McChrystal (USA, Ret.) has talked about the summer 2006 raid on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (I’ve never screamed so loudly.) JSOC’s ability to exploit, analyze and disseminate the intelligence information discovered in that raid spurred 17 more operations on the same exact night - literally just pulling the string and hunting down guys, one after another based on the intelligence gathered during the first and/or follow-on raids. That could not have happened without very dedicated and skilled Intelligence sections (or without the door-kicking face-shooters with their lives out on the line). (By the way, if you’re interested in post-SHTF Intelligence operations and haven’t yet read McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams, DO IT!) It’s this incredible utility of quickly producing actionable intelligence that makes the EAD of F3EAD so crucially important. Intelligence Collectors and Analysts play a very significant role in the Targeting process, not to diminish those who Finish, of course. Intelligence is heavily involved in Finding, Fixing, Exploiting, Analyzing and Disseminating. And that’s whether we’re targeting bomb makers, facilitators, district/provincial insurgent leadership, or global al-Qaida leaders. So what we’re going to do is run a contest in the spirit of our Patriot ancestors who may not have been as deliberate about their targeting process (which was basically the same process) as us, but who targeted their British oppressors just the same. Unless you just want to, there are no submissions, no judges, no comments. If you participate and put time and effort and energy into doing it right, then you win. (If you have legitimate questions, then ask them.) If you have both conventional (e.g., an invading army) and irregular (e.g., the Leroy Jenkins Gang) threats in your area of operations (AO), then you’ll want to do this exercise for each threat. There are no minimums, and your only maximums are limited by your ability to task and manage them. We’ll look at splitting our initial requirements among three categories: – Size, density and disposition of enemy forces (how many and where they are) – Current mobility patterns and ability to move within the AO (how, when and where they travel) – Persistence (how long they stay in the places they are) For some advanced practice, we can go one step further. Killing bad guys is just treating the symptom. While it must be done, if we really want to stem the ability to conduct operations against us, then we have to target logistics and support systems. What makes this part advanced is that you must develop your own requirements without direction from me. Refer back to a few of the older posts about Counterinsurgency (COIN) and attacking the enemy’s legitimacy and center of gravity. We can kill ants indefinitely, but it’s not until we target their ability to reproduce and sustain the ant colony that we’ll start seeing fewer ants. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: X-15 (#0)
freedomoutpost.com June 23, 2015: Extortion 17 Bombshell: America’s Special Operations are Under Command of Foreign Entities
------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||