Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 62

What Pike and Brown call a “fitness landscape”
is “a population socio-cultural-political-ecosystem,”
a construct that relates to the political, military,
economic, social, information, and infrastructure
(PMESII) system and subsystem analysis used in
JIPOE.10 Complex IPB considers individual capabilities that Pike and Brown call “fitness functions,” such
as profession, education, ethnic group, family connections, and economic need, that influence individuals’
decisions in relation to the fitness landscape.11 Using
these constructs, complex IPB can help staffs understand and take into account how individual decisions
interact and affect group dynamics.

A Holistic Way to Frame an
Operational Environment

Joint doctrine defines an operational environment
as “a composite of the conditions, circumstances, and
influences that affect the employment of capabilities and bear on the decisions of the commander.”12
Understanding the OE and defining all of its dynamics
are essential to successful intelligence preparation. The
OE construct “encompasses physical areas and factors …, the information environment (which includes
cyberspace),” and interconnected systems that can be
represented by PMESII.13
According to Joint Publication (JP) 2-01.3, Joint
Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment,
JIPOE consists of four steps intended to ensure joint
intelligence staffs include all relevant aspects of an OE in
their analysis: (1) define the OE, (2) describe the impact
of the OE, (3) evaluate the adversary and other relevant
actors, and (4) determine the course of action for the adversary and other relevant actors.14 The purpose is to help
the joint force commander predict the adversary’s most
likely actions using a holistic view of the OE and “integrating a systems perspective and a geospatial perspective
along with the force-specific IPB perspectives.”15
To distinguish IPB from JIPOE, joint doctrine
characterizes the IPB as requiring “micro-analysis … to
support component command operations,” adding that
“JIPOE and IPB analyses support each other while
avoiding a duplication of analytic effort.”16 JP 2-01.3
illustrates the focus of JIPOE with a circular illustration that places a “holistic view of the operational
environment” at the center.17 However, any OE is multidimensional, whether in Army or joint operations,
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and understanding it requires a holistic and tailored
approach to intelligence preparation. Complex IPB
suggests the need to integrate ways to perform holistic
analysis, similar to the focus of JIPOE. Figure 1 (on
page 61) shows the circular JIPOE process model, with
complex IPB interpreted similarly.
Factors usually regarded as influencing the strategic
level also affect operational and tactical planning. For
example, the strategic environment is characterized
by a mixture of complex geopolitics and demographics such as population growth, mixed migrations, and
urbanization. The relationship among these dynamics
is particularly complex due to global connectedness and
emerging and disruptive technologies. These phenomena
have created an ever-evolving ecosystem of converging
principal and hybrid threats such as revanchist states,
extremist proto-states (e.g., the Islamic State), collective
violent extremist organizations, state supporters, and
transnational organized crime networks.
Operations such as foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, and law enforcement employ a variety of activities
and collaborative efforts in the processing, exploitation,
and dissemination of intelligence relating to the threat
groups and their interactions with relevant populations. All of the aforementioned operations can occur
in isolation, or they can be combined with conventional-force offensive, defensive, and stability tasks in Army
or joint operational areas.
Complex IPB emphasizes civil considerations,
which include population groups and the societal conditions that influence them, when analyzing the OE.
The threat and threat supporting groups’ ecosystem
encompasses interactions affecting the OE; they employ a variety of capabilities, tactics, and weapons. The
associated weapons threat can be broken down into
three main categories: conventional weapons, weapons
of mass destruction (WMD), and improvised weapons.
Improvised weapons offer the potential to modify and
combine conventional and WMD capabilities through
nonmilitary means of delivery using readily available
and self-manufactured materials and technology,
making the use of improvised weapons widespread in
irregular warfare. In fact, the use of improvised weapons is widespread in many operational areas, sometimes as modified munitions and weapons, improvised
explosive devices (IEDs), or improvised chemical or
January-February 2017  MILITARY REVIEW