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Document created: 1 December 04
Air & Space Power Journal - Winter 2004

*The author is chief of the Intelligence Requirements Certification Office, Joint Staff, Pentagon, Washington, DC. A former enlisted member of the US Army Infantry, he is a career USAF intelligence officer, having served as a targets-intelligence officer or targeteer since 1995.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the reporting of battle damage assessment (BDA) was neither fast enough nor adequate for operational commanders to make timely, informed decisions.¹ This problem is nothing new. Although we saw the same sort of debilitating core difficulties with BDA in after-action reporting from Operations Desert Storm, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force, we cannot blame the folks doing the job. The BDA analysts do the best they can to produce timely, accurate, and relevant assessments. The problem lies with the current BDA standard, which evolved from the attrition-based warfare conducted during World War II. Issues with BDA in Iraqi Freedom—nearly identical to findings identified in after-action reports of operations over the last 13 years—include inadequate tracking of mission execution; lack of a common BDA database; lack of BDA education and training; problems created by modern warfare’s unprecedented speed, scope, and scale; and the low priority of BDA collection. Unfortunately, we had not resolved these matters by the time Iraqi Freedom began, although much well-intended time, effort, and money had gone into solving problems associated with legacy doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. The type of warfare waged during Iraqi Freedom—characterized by technology-enabled effects-based planning and execution in a hyperoperations-tempo battlespace—has made the current BDA paradigm obsolete. In short, modern warfare begs for a new effects-based assessment approach, which the current BDA paradigm cannot provide.

According to Joint Publication 3-60, Joint Doctrine for Targeting, dated 17 January 2002, which describes the assessment terms and processes used by the joint community, the combatant command’s staff members are responsible for all assessments produced during campaigns executed in its theater of operations (III-1, -4, -7). They typically assign teams of analysts to validate all assessments, including tactical assessments produced by the components. These processes described in current doctrine have their origins in World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War legacies of slow, deliberate, nonintegrated, sequential, attrition-based campaigns. Such a mind-set has unnecessarily forced the joint force commanders’ (JFC) staffs into confirming tactical, kinetic attacks at the expense of evaluating whether or not missions have produced broader lethal/nonlethal operational- and strategic-level effects that meet theater objectives. This legacy depends upon "pictures" or electro-optical images to definitively confirm kinetic attacks on targets. Historically, analysts rely on the delivery of images that normally come from national technical means, which typically causes assessment to lag behind the pace of modern operations. Thus, the combatant commander might unnecessarily delay operations while waiting on individual images of tactical targets.

To speed up delivery of the product, we can compress the process timeline by decentralizing responsibility for tactical assessment down to the component designated by the JFC to produce specific tactical effects. The component analysts, including weapons-effects experts, have more familiarity with effects generated by their own organic kinetic and nonkinetic weapons and rely on empirical evidence gathered in near real time by their organic sensors. Using predetermined tactical indicators, they can then make more timely assessments, based on how well attacks achieved the predicted tactical effects. In turn, the JFC staffs, integrating component tactical assessments, can concentrate on evaluating the production of higher-level operational effects, based on predetermined operational indicators. This has always been the intent. However, because the JFC staffs stay busy confirming tactical attacks on targets, they cannot concentrate on verifying higher-level lethal and nonlethal effects. Clearly, at a minimum, we need to reevaluate doctrine in light of the modern capability to create operational effects at a faster pace.

Collaborative system-automation tools can resolve many of these problems. After Desert Storm, we emphasized development of an automated, collaborative targeting-database software application that included access to BDA data and reporting, independent of the location of users and distributed BDA producers. Regrettably, after a decade of work, the application has not yet met all user requirements. We must continue the development, certification, and deployment of an assessment-database application interoperable with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Modernized Integrated Database and databases resident in the Theater Battle Management Core Systems, as well as other component command and control systems. Such an application is vitally important to the combatant commands and those distributed BDA producers tasked with supporting them. It will enable BDA-production organizations to deconflict production, making them more efficient and timely.

Following certification and deployment of the database, we must populate the data fields not only with assessments but also mission-related data. After the removal of Saddam Hussein, staff members at US Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) have repeatedly stated that if they had just had a reliable way to track every executed air-to-ground mission, they could have completed some rudimentary but timely assessments, based on the reliability and accuracy of modern precision weapons. The dynamic nature of the battlespace further exacerbated the situation. Coalition ground forces maintained constant, close contact with the enemy from the first day of the war. To support the ground scheme of maneuver, CENTAF planners continually changed preplanned targets and scheduled on-call missions that launched without such targets. Since we had no effective automated system or process to fully track the hundreds of changed targets or those attacked by on-call missions, members of the CENTAF assessment staff became overwhelmed early in the war when they attempted to track missions manually—the first step in assessment. BDA production immediately fell behind and never fully recovered. Therefore, an automated air-mission tracker system that autopopulates the assessment database with mission-related data by communicating machine-to-machine with weapons and sensor platforms is essential to the conduct of efficient and timely BDA.

This type of system will also help alleviate the BDA-collection issue. However, it will not completely solve it since we cannot preplan and task collections for these dynamic missions. Current methods and capabilities will never be effective for a war like Iraqi Freedom. Obviously, we need to explore and develop other approaches to gather postattack information, including self-assessing weapons, platforms not typically associated with assembling postattack data, and sensors other than those used for electro-optical imaging. Following an attack, after mission-related data from sensor platforms is parsed into the assessment database—independent of method or platform—and autocorrelated with the air-to-ground, mission-related data, BDA analysts can "pull," fuse, and exploit collected data on high-priority targets. This procedure has the added benefit of giving planners and targeting personnel better situational awareness of attacked targets, making ongoing planning more effective.

Another automated-assessment solution involves computer-modeling entire target systems. Most combatant commands and supporting intelligence agencies produce some type of analysis product used to model such systems with software-application tools already developed by the military and private industry. Modeling can provide better insight into the location of critical nodes and vulnerabilities, making predictive-effects analysis a reality and target selection more effective. Relying on analysts’ interpretations of these nodes and vulnerabilities, the models could run simulated missions and packages based on documented weapons effects to predict the operational-level cumulative and cascading effects of air operations across the theater. These models could also come into play after a day’s worth of dynamic missions, involving aircraft launching with no preplanned targets, to provide at least a basic assessment of how well the missions cumulatively met operational-level objectives. Of course, this depends upon knowing the location of all mission taskings in the first place, which, as mentioned previously, requires automation. In the future, long-term assessment will compare how well the computer model predicted actual tactical, operational, and strategic effects, thus producing more reliable data points that we can use to correct the models and make them more accurate. Conceivably, a computer-modeled predictive assessment may represent the only short-term appraisal available in the integrated, hyperoperations-tempo battlespace of the future. Having some sort of measured, near-real-time, operational predictive assessment is better than no assessment at all (usually the case under the current paradigm).

We have always had concerns about education and training in BDA. Since this type of assessment occurs only in wartime, peacetime training is usually nonexistent or sporadic at best. During most peacetime training, BDA-related reporting follows a script, and dissemination occurs in near real time so the event doesn’t get bogged down while we wait on the report. Additionally, we make no attempt to do analytical-assessment training since, routinely, an experienced control group performs assessment to keep the event moving and focused on the primary learning objectives, which typically don’t include BDA. This scenario tends to create unrealistic expectations in the minds of commanders as well as the planning and execution staffs. More realistically, BDA scripting for war games and exercises should make the commander realize that in-depth assessment will not be timely and that short-term assessment, depending on the commander’s time constraints, may not be wholly complete or accurate. However, in a time crunch, analysts must learn the importance of making the best assessment possible, based on the limited information available—and commanders need to know this.

We should make these principles major learning objectives of both war games and exercises. Furthermore, we should incorporate tactical- and operational-assessment analysis, including weapons-effects training, into continuation training for intelligence-production centers tasked with producing wartime assessments—and then we should evaluate such training during inspections. Doing so will force leaders in the chain of command to ensure that their personnel have the proper time, tools, and education to fulfill a primary wartime task. In the hyperoperations-tempo battlespace of the future, long-term, in-depth assessment may have no relevance to commanders by the time they receive it, since operations probably will have moved on. However, intelligence-production centers should prepare themselves to carry out this task since we will still need long-term, in-depth assessment at the conclusion of operations or in the event that they stall.

Iraqi Freedom moved too fast and furiously for our cumbersome assessment paradigm, currently based on an attrition-based mind-set, stressing the entire cycle to its breaking point. Combatant commands and their assigned functional components should face the fact that our assessment doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures need an effects-based, technology-enabled revision to go along with effects-based planning and execution. Since no one has ever deemed BDA particularly successful, we have no "best practices" to emulate and record in doctrine. While we still have time before the next crisis and while the problem has the attention of senior military leaders, we should move immediately to change the current BDA paradigm, in accordance with the type of warfare waged in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the next war, every assessment could become crucial since America might not enjoy the asymmetric advantages of air superiority and seemingly unlimited stockpiles of precision weapons. By developing new assessment processes in doctrine, leveraging automation, creating innovative predictive-modeling tools, and providing accountable education and training, we can provide the boss with more timely, actionable effects-based assessments. The key word here is actionable. If the current assessment paradigm produces nonactionable assessments, then it is obsolete and of no use to the twenty-first-century war fighter who will operate in a time-compressed, hyperoperations-tempo battlespace.

1. Joint Publication 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 12 April 2001 (as amended through 9 June 2004), defines BDA as "the timely and accurate estimate of damage resulting from the application of military force, either lethal or non-lethal, against a predetermined objective" (63). This article uses BDA, the common designation for assessment, interchangeably with the latter term.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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