Understanding Measures of Effectiveness in Counterinsurgency Operations

Both the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy recently recognized that insurgency is causing an increased threat to the security of the world. This recognition combined with the fact that the military's counterinsurgency effort in Iraq is the central front on the Global War on Terrorism has caused the military to reorient its capabilities towards defeating the threat of an insurgency. An important piece of this reorientation needs to be focused on an increased understanding of measures of effectiveness and their integration into the operational framework of a counterinsurgency campaign. An examination of the theory, history, and doctrine of counterinsurgency operations is conducted to develop a general framework of an insurgency. An understanding of the general insurgency framework is then used to develop an operational design for counterinsurgency campaigns that applies logical lines of operations that are linked to the strategic end state. This framework makes it possible to develop the theory that to be useful, measures of effectiveness must contain certain characteristics. To be a valuable analytical tool that assists the commander in making decisions, a measure of effectiveness must contain the following characteristics; it must be meaningful, it must be linked to the strategic end state, it must have a strong identifiable relationship between cause and effect, it must be observable, it must be quantifiable, and it must be precise. The better a measure of effectiveness adheres to these characteristics the more valuable a tool it will be for the commander. In addition to these characteristics, an attribute of measures of effectiveness is that they must be correlated to changes in the environment to attain timeliness as the operation progresses. To validate the proposed theory that a measure of effectiveness that adheres to certain characteristics becomes a valuable evaluation tool to determine if counterinsurgency operations are meeting