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Effective Modeling and Support Depends on Good Data and Good Understanding Between Analysts and Commanders

• While our research addressed irregular warfare in general, our findings explicitly reflect counterinsurgency experience in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. These two campaigns reflect a subset of irregular warfare, but that encompasses a broad spectrum of operations.
• Tactical, logistics, and force protection support has often been effective.
• There is little evidence that strategic, campaign assessment, and force-structuring analyses have been successful.
• It is not clear that operations research or systems analysis are applicable for all irregular warfare analytic problems.
• Most decision support derives from simple analyses, not complex modeling.
• Reachback support is useful, but its usefulness is limited by a number of factors.
• Some commanders are insufficiently prepared to use analysts or to use analyses.
• Commanders have trouble articulating their needs, but analysts tend to be self-motivated.
• Many recurring, periodic reports had little value and sapped analytic capacity.
• Data quality is generally poor and inconsistent.
• There is no clear understanding of what is meant by analysis or assessment in counterinsurgency.
• Simulation, or wargaming, is useful for decision support but has limits.

RAND conducted a lessons learned examination of operations analysis, modeling, and simulation in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. This report identifies ways in which analysts have attempted to support commanders' decisions in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, describes many of the models and tools they employed, provides insight into the challenges they faced, and suggests ways in which the application of modeling, simulation, and analysis might be improved for current and future operations. RAND identified four broad categories of decisions: force protection, logistics, campaign assessment, and force structuring. Modeling, simulation, and analysis were most effective in supporting force protection and logistics decisions, and least effective in supporting campaign assessment and force structuring.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Decision Issues and Analysis in COIN and IW Literature

• Chapter Three

  Support to Force Protection Decisions

• Chapter Four

  Support to Logistics Decisions

• Chapter Five

  Support to Campaign Assessment Decisions

• Chapter Six

  Support to Force Structuring

• Chapter Seven

  Conclusions, Findings, and Recommendations

• Appendix

  Review of Selected Models and Simulations