FORUM

By Barry List

A Defense Science Board report on counterinsurgency made public in May cites a definite role for operations research in the nation’s defenses.
“Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Intelligence:

Counterinsurgency (COIN) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations” (www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2011-05-COIN.pdf) was commissioned by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during his previous tenure as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

The report’s executive summary notes that the task force conducted its investigation in response to Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s 2010 critique of military intelligence in Afghanistan and the shortfall in serving the needs of high-level decision-makers (“Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/AfghanIntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf).

Among already available tools for improving defense intelligence are better employment of the military’s operations research capability.

“While the current challenges are certainly unique, one must draw upon the lessons learned on how to apply O.R. to [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] challenges,” the report says.

Maximum Use of Scare Resources

The report noted O.R.’s special value of making maximum use of scarce resources.

“It is important to recognize the intensity of the resource limitations under which the DoD is operating, the growing severity of these limitations and the enormous costs to sustain current operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere,” the report says. “However, improvements modest in their cost can be undertaken immediately. These improvements include more use of systems analysis, operations research and planning efforts to improve the efficiencies of TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] and limited ISR resources, and better inter-Service coordination…”

– Maj. Gen. (retired) Richard O’Lear, co-chair of the Task Force and president/CEO of Sage Intelligence Associates.

Maj. Gen. (retired) Richard O’Lear, co-chair of the Task Force and President/CEO of Sage Intelligence Associates, adds, “I am a strong proponent of O.R. and hope the government will begin to use it more as the budget process forces us to make some major cuts.”

In a recent INFORMS Science of Better podcast (www.scienceofbetter.org/podcast/olear.html), O’Lear calls on operations researchers to help the Defense Department improve intelligence.

“One of the things I would encourage all the folks who embrace O.R. as a vocation, as a passion, as a profession is to help the DoD work around the metrics issue,” O’Lear says in the podcast. “How you measure outputs better on a very subjective thing like intelligence is a tough thing to do and something we struggled with. If you can give some brain cells to that problem and surface those solutions to people in the intelligence community, that would be very valuable to our country.”

INFORMS and the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) commended the Defense Department Board Task Force on Defense Intelligence for the report.

“As intelligence agencies collect massive amounts of data about threats to the U.S. and its allies, they need sophisticated ways to sift through all this information, identify what is vital, detect patterns, and use these lessons to make the best decisions for actions to pursue, sometimes under resource or otherwise constrained circumstances,” says INFORMS President Rina Schneur. “Operations research and advanced analytics have demonstrated that they can – and should – play such an important role in crucial intelligence decisions.”

Terry McKearney, president MORS, adds, “The Task Force’s findings underscore our feelings that the discipline of operations research can serve the full range of efforts needed to meet the growing threats our nation faces today. MORS has highlighted the need for new analytic tools to support such contemporary problems as counter intelligence and our activities over the past few years have helped our members develop new approaches to addressing these problems. It’s gratifying to see that commanders in the field and professionals in other fields are realizing the contribution O.R. can bring to the successful accomplishment of the mission.”

Key Studies in Operations Research

The INFORMS journal Operations Research published two key studies cited in the current report: “Confronting Entrenched Insurgents” by Edward H. Kaplan, Moshe Kress and Roberto Szechtman, and “Why Defeating Insurgencies is Hard: The Effect of Intelligence in Counterinsurgency Operations – A Best Case Scenario” by Moshe Kress and Roberto Szechtman.

Les Servi of MITRE, a former treasurer of INFORMS, served on the Task Force. INFORMS members Jack Keane of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and Dan Maxwell of KaDSCI LLC also served.

Those interviewed during preparation of the report include retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, and Michael Vickers, who currently serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

A 2009, “Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Intelligence: Operations Research Applications for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR)” (www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA493773.pdf), recommended that defense intelligence officials take greater advantage of the advanced analytics methods that are a hallmark of operations research.

In the INFORMS Science of Better podcast, Gen. O’Lear comments on the 2009 report. He notes that although the Defense Department guidelines call for operations research to be used when making major purchasing and policy decisions, O.R. is not used consistently.

“What we found is that a lot of people paid lip service to O.R., claiming that they checked it off in the process of buying this, that or something else,” he says, “but in reality they defined O.R. in a manner that would not meet our test for what O.R. is. They didn’t clearly identify the stakeholders, there was very much an ad hoc business, they didn’t identify the assumptions, they didn’t identify the metrics, they didn’t identify all the different variables and factors involved in the metrics that they built.”

O’Lear also expresses concern that not enough operations researchers were being trained in the Army, Navy and Air Force, and that there was a shortfall in advanced O.R. education in the military.

“Those were just a couple of glimpses of the status of O.R. in the government,” he says. “Despite all the lip service, it wasn’t consistent in how it was being used.”

Barry List (barry.list@informs.org) is the director of communications at INFORMS.