Irregular Warfare
EBR began working issues of irregular warfare in the 1990s, with focus on the command arrangement challenges confronting the US and multinational forces in peace operations. We organized a series of workshops and published several books, including Command Arrangements for Peace Operations (1995), Humanitarian and Peace Operations (1996), and Interagency and Political-military Dimensions of Peace Operations: Haiti (1996). EBR’s analysis of the 1994 Haiti intervention became essential reading at the Joint Forces Command and Staff College. More recently, the focus on peace operations has been extended to cover CT and COIN environments and other “complex endeavors.”
EBR’s IW work builds upon its extended history of involvement in the analysis of instability in developing world environments, and its focus on governance challenges in developing countries.
Beginning in 2007, for a consortium of DoD customers including PA&E (now CAPE), J8-WAD, OPNAV N816, and OSD/AT&L, EBR collaborated with PA Consulting to develop a causal framework and System Dynamics model of a Third World scenario to improve understanding of underlying drivers of COIN and for use in stability and reconstruction operations and irregular warfare (IW) wargaming. EBR developed the political-economic-social framework for the underlying scenario, basing this on in-depth research into current dynamics of the region and interviews with regional experts. EBR also developed a full spectrum of quantitative and qualitative social, demographic and economic data to populate the model, revealing a rich volume of data for describing scenario reality.
When the SD model was used in a multi-model, OSD/PA&E-sponsored, IW wargame, EBR served as a primary subject matter expert source in the White Team cell and was actively involved in overall model evaluation conducted by the Marine Corps’s MCCDC/Operations Analysis Division. In each of these phases, EBR effectively represented the likely responses of local leaders and groups based on its in-depth research into the country/scenario under study. EBR also represented likely USG inter-agency responses, based on its own prior experience in inter-agency contexts and coordination with professionals from the inter-agency itself. EBR worked consistently with model developers to improve balance between effective social science representation of developing country scenarios and model simplicity.