General James Mattis of the Marine Corps has slammed Effects-Based Operations (EBO). His critique is persuasive, though blaming Israel's 2006 defeat on EBO is a bit unfair (bad grand strategy is the culprit). EBO is a method of campaign planning that relies on harnessing full elements of national power to achieve strategic effects. It is derived from Air Force theorist John Warden's theory that the enemy can be considered an organic system that can be overloaded through the targeting of certain critical nodes (psychological, command and control, industrial, etc). EBO takes it a step further by attempting to create causality through kinetic and nonkinetic effects, which create a cascading reaction among the enemy's system.
To some extent, EBO is the Air Force's brainchild. Although EBO is a joint doctrine, implicit in its language is the idea that air attacks are the most suitable means for targeting these nodes.This is, after all, what air power theory has promised since Douhet--the ability to take out the enemy's key nodes and disable his operations without much need for the ground pounders to pulverize. It is an attractive idea, especially against a brittle regime such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq or 2001 Taliban Afghanistan that cannot withstand sustained and violent shocks. Unfortunately, it has little applicability to counterinsurgency (although insurgents can use it themselves--John Robb has said in Brave New War that global guerrilla doctrine is a modified form of EBO) and it is questionable how well it would work against a true peer competitor such as China.
But the point of Mattis' critique is that it is conceptually flawed. He writes that it assumes a level of predictability that ignores the fog of war, cannot correctly anticipate the reactions of complex systems, requires an unattainable level of knowledge about the enemy, is over-engineered, and promotes micomanagement (among other things). It is also vague, and like Thomas K. Adams points out in The Army After Next, cannot be implemented below the strategic level. Mattis recommends a return to traditional campaign design.
Mattis' critique is another example of a growing backlash against network-centric strategic concepts. However, EBO will probably appear again---under a different name, most likely. It speaks very strongly to a managerial kind of thought that policymakers find attractive. The enduring belief in the use of cascading systems failure to disable to enemy is also far older than EBO, which is just its latest manifestation.
Thanks for linking to this, I would never have come across it otherwise.
Posted by: PurpleSlog | August 30, 2008 at 02:50 PM