¿Estamos asumiendo lo peor acerca de las asunciones? Inducción, deducción e inteligencia militar en contrainsurgencia

AutorLeo Blanken & Justin Overbaugh
Páginas194-220

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Introduction

Military intelligence is struggling to define its place in the war in Afghani-stan. The recent "Flynn Report" provided a scathing critique of the intelligence efforts in that conflict — calling them "token", ineffectual", and "failing to advance the war effort" — and the report's position has even been endorsed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (Pessin, 2010; and Flynn et al, 2010). According to such critics, the military intelligence appa-ratus is struggling to fill its role of supporting commanders in the counterin-surgency (COIN) environment; it fails to do so by binding itself to "detailed information about the enemy" and ignoring a "vast and underappreciated body of information, almost all of which is unclassified... [which] admit-tedly offers few clues about where to find insurgents, but it does provide elements of even greater strategic importance — a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself (Flynn et al, 2010: 7). These critics propose a move away from the rigid nature of traditional military intelligence and replacing it with cells of intelligence officers who would cast a far wider net for information, ranging across cultural, social, religious, and economic dimensions without preconceived structure. The Stability Operations Information Centers (SOICs) established as a result of Flynn's study, for example, explicitly reject the notion that deductive analy-sis is useful in counterinsurgency:

The governing logic of our planning and processes and our staff organizations was built on deductive logic where syllogism, reductionism, and other 'engi-neering' approaches produced adequate results.-.However the contemporary op-erating environment is not offering a mirrored logical construct to plan and execute against...[COIN] requires newways of thinking, new processes and new organizations capable of absorbing information and fusing it into understand-ing...(SOIC Director and Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team RC West, 2010:2)

This quote, then, reveáis that in former conflicts, the deductive "order of battle" intelligence process was driven by an implicit model of the enemy, based on our "mirror imaging" of the enemy based on our own military structure. SOIC's argument instead advocates further immersion in the local

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milieu — which some may find shocking given that tens of thousands of Coalition forces have been so immersed for almost a decade — to induce the answers. We label such a position as the "overly inductive" approach to intelligence.

The consternation expressed by Flynn and other critics reveáis grave challenges for intelligence services when facing irregular adversarles. Success in such conflicts relies heavily on situational awareness, and yet traditional military intelligence organizations are often unprepared to opérate in such operational environments. We agree with the Flynn Report to the extent that conventional "order of battle" military intelligence is misplaced on the COIN battlefield; we disagree, however, with the proposed solution of abandoning the use of assumptive frameworks to structure military intelligence in favor of an increased flow of unbiased and unstructured informa-tion. We, rather, argüe for a balanced utilization of both inductive and de-ductive reasoning in military intelligence activities in counterinsurgency operations in general, and the Afghanistan conflict in particular. More spe-cifically, we argüe that it will be more fruitful to replace the oíd "mirror im-age" model of the enemy that Flynn rails against with an explicit COIN model, rather than abandon all modeling efforts and proceed wholly induc-tively. It is only through such a revised deductive approach that we can solve the twin problem of giving policy-makers the information they desire, while recognizing the realities of military intelligence structures.

We have two goals in this article. The first is to provide a new lens through which to assess military intelligence doctrine. To do so, we develop the argument that military intelligence works best when deduction from as-sumed analytic constructs is prominently included in a mixed deductive-inductive process. Such frameworks have traditionally been in place, though often used implicitly, in conventional war-fighting environments. These models structure the efforts of intelligence practitioners regarding choice of data to be gathered, as well as the types of inferences to be drawn from that data. In COIN environments, however, such analytic frameworks of the conflict have often been left undeveloped with correspondingly poor results. We argüe that including a deductive model of the environment is desirable for three reasons: it forces a prioritization and de-confliction of policy goals, it forces implicit assumptions to be made transparent, and, finally, it guides the intelligence work to be conducted. The second goal of the paper is to

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genérate policy prescriptions for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan based on this argument. More specifically, we argüe that the political leadership and strategic command must work harder to choose a model of the war that allows for a greater role for deduction. In sum, we argüe that political leadership must think about what it would like to do in Afghanistan and invest in a coherent model of how to do it. This will allow for the military intelli-gence apparatus to execute its tasks far more effectively.

We proceed as follows. First, we lay out the concepts of induction and deduction and survey their usage in the social sciences. Next we lay these concepts over the spectrum of warfare, contrasting conventional war to counterinsurgency. By using the illustrative cases of the Second World War and the Vietnam War, we show that deduction formed a crucial component of intelligence work in the Second World War, while the lack of its applica-tion in the Vietnam War contributed considerably to failure in that conflict. Finally, we take our arguments to the role of intelligence in current COIN conflicts. To do so, we assess current operations and training for US Army intelligence and appraise some existing operational level COIN models that could be utilized to structure the intelligence mission in the war. Finally, we conclude with specific policy recommendations and avenues for future re-search. In particular, we argüe that US strategic-political leadership must choose an assumptive framework for current COIN operations such as Afghanistan. In doing so, they will be forced to define goals and show that they have a coherent strategy for COIN, this will in turn structure and guide the efforts of military intelligence practitioners.

Generating Some Arguments Regarding Induction and Deduction

Induction and deduction constitute the two basic processes of human rea-soning, by which we attempt to move beyond brute sense perception and make meaningful inferences about the nature of the world. We argüe that these are both necessary tools for re-assessing the role of intelligence in a COIN environment — more specifically how the absence or presence of a framework of assumptions may help drive the intelligence process. To de-velop this argument we first explain the classic concepts of induction and

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deduction, examine debates surrounding their relative utility in explaining social phenomena, and finally their use in intelligence. We conclude by ar-guing that deduction has traditionally performed a necessary function in the military intelligence process — one that we will show has hitherto been ne-glected in the COIN environment.

Induction traditionally refers to the process of inferring a general law or principie from the observation of particular instances, while deduction "is a process in which we derive conclusions from intuited premises through valid arguments, ones in which the conclusión must be true if the premises are true" (Markie, 2010)1. These definitions of induction and deduction date back to the ancient Greeks' use of these concepts as a basis for the scientific endeavor: "Aristotle viewed scientific inquiry as a progression from observa-tions to general principies and back to observations. He maintained that the scientist should induce explanatory principies from the phenomena to be explained, and then deduce statements about the phenomena from premises which include these principies" (Losee, 1993: 6). The important distinction between the two is that deduction relies on an assumptive framework ("intuited premises") about the nature of the phenomena that are given as true, while the inductive approach dispenses with such a priori assumptions and focuses on letting the data "speak for itself'.

In social science, the valué of utilizing either approach has been heavily emphasized by different camps of researchers. The relative valué of induction and deduction fall somewhat across disciplinary Unes — with econom-ics and political science favoring deduction, while sociology and anthropol-ogy are associated with induction. We now briefly survey each approach in turn.

The role of deduction was championed by Hempel, who argued that both explaining and predicting phenomena was accomplished by subsuming observed events under universal laws — what is referred to as deductive-nomological reasoning (See Hempel, 1942: 35-48; See Hempel and Op-penheim, 1948: 135-75)...

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