Archaeologies of the Future: Part II--Reveries on EBO

General James Mattis' critique of Effects-Based Operations has made waves. There is extensive theoretical discussion of EBO in both the Joint Force Quarterly and Military Review. Small Wars Journal links to the discussion here. Critics are certainly correct that EBO is a mechanistic approach that views war as a kind of materialist enterprise where a certain effect can be calibrated for each action with perfect accuracy.

The greater problem is that war planners thought in grossly materialist terms--in Iraq there was little attention to social consequences of war planning that fueled the growth of the insurgency, and the IDF's generals did not really give much thought to the political dynamics of Lebanon in 2006. The problem with imagining the enemy as a machine is that machines are incapable of generating original strategies of their own. This is at the heart of Paul Van Riper's critique in Joint Force Quarterly when he attacks the systems theory approach to defense.

Machines (at present at least) are not capable of understanding or intentionality. Artifical intelligence playing chess, for example, operate by heuristic models that function as rules of thumb for desired outcomes. But human beings can respond and innovate to enemy strategies. Instead of the dynamic interaction between opposing forces on battlefields of multifacted social/spatial terrain, the EBO view of combat is linear and Newtonian.