The Death of EBO?

General Mattis's guidance that USJFCOM cease the use of Effects Based Operations (EBO) concepts does not bode well for its future. Here's a few extracts I found interesting:

• "The joint force must act in uncertainty and thrive in chaos, sensing opportunity therein and not retreating into a need for more information."


• "EBO ... assumes an unachievable level of predictability"


• "... any planning construct that mechanistically attempts to provide certainty and predictability in an inherently uncertain environment is fundamentally at odds with the nature of war."


• "The use of 'effects' has confused what previously was a well-designed and straightforward process for determining 'ends.'"


• "The underlying principles associated with EBO, ONA [Operational Net Assessment], and SoSA [System of Systems Analysis] are fundamentally flawed and must be removed from our lexicon, training, and operations. EBO thinking, as the Israelis found, is an intellectual 'Maginot Line' around which the enemy can maneuver. Effective immediately, USJFCOM will no longer use, sponsor, or export the terms and concepts related to EBO, ONA, and SoSA in our training, doctrine development, and support of JPME."

My limited understanding of EBO was acquired incidentally when I became interested in Network Centric Warfare a few years back. So, I don't know enough about the details of EBO to have strong opinions about it.

However, General Mattis's statement did prompt a few snap reactions:

• EBO, like NCW, seems to have come to prominence in part because of the emergence of hyperconnectivity in communications and information technology. This revolution prompted visions of coordinating effects with unprecedented precision across a battlespace. As I've said before, I think the basic concepts of NCW (as depicted in Figures 5 and 11 of "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare") are exactly right in their emphasis on the social and cognitive aspects of turning information into actions. However, I've also noted that the U.S. implementation of these concepts seems to have overemphasized information sharing, to the detriment of the social and cognitive domains. General Mattis's critique of EBO recognizes that robust information may actually degrade decision making if the cognitive and social domains are not also considered.


• There seems to be a widespread feeling among John Boyd's followers that the intellectual leaders of NCW have promoted concepts that are flawed understandings of Boyd's ideas (e.g., the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop). I may have misunderstood these critiques, or it may be that the NCW theorists were on a track parallel to Boyd (a common situation when a fundamental new idea is on the horizon). Regardless, I think it's true that NCW does not emphasize "staying inside the opponent's decision making loop" the way OODA does. General Mattis's critique seems to imply that EBO reflects this deficiency.


• Users of a process must own it. According to Mattis, EBO is "staff, not command, led." All of us who live in large organizations understand that creating robust and mature processes is relatively easy (though expensive). The hard part is getting those processes into the heads of those who use them, and to do so in such a way that robust coherent decisions and actions are established and maintained.


• There seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of war. This is why I think Cynefin is such a useful framework. It helps analytically oriented individuals and organizations understand the limitations of analysis and the need for agile probing in Complex contexts (which is what most battlespaces are).


• Trying to attack a Complex problem using analysis, complicated organizations, and thick processes is a recipe for failure. What's needed are relatively simple organizations and processes that (a) provide "just enough" structure to maintain coherent action and (b) are able to run OODA loops fast enough to maintain relevance. Again, see Cynefin.


• Finally, I can't help wondering if there's a bit of "emergence magic" mixed into EBO. As with NCW, I may be misunderstanding what I've seen, but there's an "information for free" mentality that seems to occasionally pop up in discussions of pervasive hyperconnectivity. As someone who has been entranced by a number of books describing complex adaptive systems and emergence, I understand the temptation to think that mixing the right ingredients with the right incantation might result in the emergence of an unexpected synergy. However, our ability to design emergent behavior to achieve a specific goal seems to be very limited at this point.

Anyway, if you're the least bit interested in asymmetric and irregular warfare, General Mattis's article is must reading.