Blind Spots: Preventing Will-ToFight Intelligence Failures

Nathan White, Ph.D.

Recent US failures to accurately evaluate “will to fight” in Afghanistan 

and Ukraine are said to derive from IC analytic deficiencies and a US 

military culture that prioritizes weapons and technology. However, they

are rooted more in how the United States projects influence globally and 

structures its government. Intelligence customers and producers focus 

on military capabilities of friends and foes and on the intentions of 

foreign leaders, while focusing less on the will of the military forces and 

local populace. Ongoing efforts to improve analytic methods will not 

prevent recurring failures. Only institutional reforms within the national 

security and foreign policy communities to prioritize human influence 

and greater IC assertiveness in initiating long-term, in-depth collection 

and analysis on the human aspect will resolve this institutional blind spot.

RESEARCH SHORT

February 27, 2024

What this is:

This report is the product 

of academic research. As the 

IC’s university, NIU is uniquely 

positioned to use academic 

approaches to research—and 

report on—subjects of interest 

to the community.

What this is not:

This is not finished intelligence. 

The opinions expressed in this 

report are solely the author’s 

and not those of National 

Intelligence University, or any 

other US Government agency.

IMAGES FROM SHUTTERSTOCK

CATALYST Designed to spark positive 

conversations on the future of the IC 
2

Recurring Failures To Address “Human Will”...

Failures by many in the US Government to accurately evaluate the will of Afghanistan’s 

security forces, government officials, and populace to resist the Taliban takeover of 

Afghanistan in 2021 and the Ukrainians’ will to resist Russia’s invasion in 2022 are the latest

iterations of a recurring struggle to move beyond traditional military capability analysis to 

evaluate human will. For decades, the United States has struggled to account for the will—the 

decisionmaking and associated behavior, further described as 

the wish, choice, desire, intent, or general disposition to act 

toward a desired end—of actors who have the potential to 

influence outcomes that impact US national security and 

foreign policy interests. Routinely underevaluated is the will of 

military forces—especially those of partner forces the United 

States helps train, arm, and supply—and foreign populations in 

areas deemed strategically important.

This institutional blind spot wreaks havoc on US planning and 

execution of national security strategy and foreign policy. 1

Commonly traced back to the US counterinsurgency campaign 

in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, here policymakers and 

military leaders prioritized intelligence on adversary military 

capabilities and focused less on the perspectives of the local 

people, friendly and enemy military forces, and the enemy’s 

politico-military approach.2 Concentrating on Soviet military 

and technological capabilities during the Cold War, while 

overlooking less substantial reporting on societal indicators of 

decline, led the United States to be caught offguard by the 

collapse of the Soviet Union.3 Focusing on military capability 

has also led to overestimations of a willingness to fight, 

including assessments of the Iraqi Army’s desire to fight to the 

death in the Gulf War in 1991.4

Post-9/11, the United States failed to adequately consider the 

perspectives of key actors among the indigenous populations in 

Iraq and Afghanistan, enabling misguided approaches that 

created fertile ground for insurgencies. 5 While maintaining 

relatively accurate assessments of indigenous military 

capabilities and creating a revolutionary terrorist targeting 

machine that exploited intelligence to “find, fix, and finish” 

adversary forces with unprecedented efficiency, the United States struggled to consider the 

perspectives of other relevant actors in both countries to inform effective counterinsurgency 

campaigns.6 This challenge persisted into the Arab Spring when a Tunisian street vendor selfimmolated in December 2010—an event nobody could have predicted. The United States 

possessed a detailed understanding of the military capabilities and leaders across the Middle 

– Ben Connable et al., Will To Fight: 

Analyzing, Modeling, and Simulating 

the Will To Fight of Military Units;

Michael J. McNerney et al., National 

Will To Fight: Why Some States Keep 

Fighting and Others Don’t

The RAND Corporation defines 

military will to fight as “the 

disposition and decision to fight, 

to act, or to persevere when 

needed,” and national will to 

fight as “the determination of a 

national government to conduct 

sustained military and other 

operations for some objective 

even when the expectation of 

success decreases or the need for 

significant political, economic, 

and military sacrifices increases—

of friendly and adversary actors.” 

Fighting at the national level 

includes “not only military force 

but also the use of all aspects 

of national power to achieve 

particular political objectives.”
3

East, but mostly missed the growing popular revolutionary energy that was ignited by images of 

the vendor’s horrific plight.7 And, although the United States subsequently detected the growing 

size and strength in Syria of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and what became the Islamic State’s military 

capabilities in 2013, it mostly missed the societal factors that led to the disenfranchisement of 

Iraq’s Sunni population and degraded the Iraqi Army’s will to fight—paving the way for ISIS 

forces to take over almost a third of the country in 2014, mostly unopposed.8

Missing the human aspect similarly fueled the more recent failures to evaluate will to fight in 

Afghanistan and Ukraine. The United States generally understood Afghan Government and 

Taliban military capabilities and their leadership intentions. But, as GEN Mark Milley noted, 

“The timeframe of a rapid collapse was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months, 

and even years following our departure.” 9 Many in the US Government failed to fully 

recognize how changing security, political, and societal factors, and withdrawal of American 

air and intelligence support, would lead much of the Afghan populace and military to 

pragmatically conclude it made sense to submit to the Taliban’s will as Afghan leaders ran for 

their lives. On Ukraine, the United States accurately anticipated Vladimir Putin’s aggressive 

intentions and assessed, with stunning precision, Russia’s military movements in the leadup to 

its invasion.10 But many in the US Government failed to understand or anticipate the decision 

calculus of the Ukrainian population, military, and government officials and their will to stand 

up to this Russian aggression.11

... Amid Repeated Efforts To Improve the Intelligence Process

In the wake of these will-to-fight judgment shortfalls, observers commonly blamed the IC for 

failing to predict outcomes or, alternatively, the decisionmakers who consume intelligence for 

failing to accept the IC’s analysis. In truth, these repeat failures to address the human aspect 

arise out of the US intelligence process, and they are best thought of as institutional failures of 

that process in which both producers and consumers of intelligence have a part. The cases 

above reveal a track record of misjudgments where sometimes parts of the IC got it wrong, and 

in other cases customers were more to blame. The IC collects and analyzes information, 

disseminating reports to customers—policymakers at the national level, and civilian and 

military leaders, planners, and operators at home and in the field—but these customers’ 

requirements largely drive intelligence collection and production.12

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, combatant 

commands, and the military services pursued various initiatives to improve knowledge about 

foreign populations and integrate more holistic assessments of the people’s will to inform the 

application of US hard and soft power.13 As it became increasingly clear the United States was 

facing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, these efforts gained momentum to inform 

population-centric counterinsurgency campaigns that considered drivers of stabilizing and 

destabilizing behavior among the local people in both countries.

14 They sponsored conferences 

and tabletop exercises with subject matter experts, funded research studies, and facilitated 

exploratory working groups.15 They sought to integrate social science expertise into planning
4

and intelligence analysis, while introducing concepts such as sociocultural intelligence, 

population-centric intelligence, human terrain analysis, human geography, and the human 

aspects of military operations.20 Some theorized a so-called “human domain” represented an 

additional warfighting domain.21 These efforts yielded new analytical frameworks, offices, 

and programs, as well as new doctrine and concepts 

that addressed requirements for knowledge about 

relevant actor will.

22

When the United States was surprised by many 

Iraqi actors’ acquiescence to the ISIS invasion in 

2014, the US Government introduced “will to fight” 

as operative terminology. The Army was particularly 

forward-leaning, funding a series of RAND studies 

that sought to identify how to improve US 

capabilities for evaluating the will to fight. 23

RAND’s comprehensive methodologies sought to 

drive analysts to consider a broader range of actors 

and associated factors that would generate more 

holistic assessments of military and national will to 

fight—and ultimately more thoughtful policies. 24

Still, the United States made critical misjudgments 

about the will to fight in Afghanistan and Ukraine.25

Institutional Blind Spots Impede 

Study of Will To Fight

Despite efforts to develop tools and methodologies,

the United States’ persistent focus on military 

capabilities and leadership analysis, while giving 

less consideration to the human factors that 

also influence national and military will to fight, 

most likely is symptomatic of deeply ingrained 

institutional factors that create a blind spot. Key 

among these factors is the way the United States 

projects its influence globally and how the 

government is organized to formulate and execute 

foreign policy and national security strategies.

US Global Influence

America’s approach to projecting influence abroad by pursuing military and technological 

superiority and encouraging foreign leaders to reform their countries to align more with 

American democratic values causes its focus on military capability and leadership intent to the 

PERSISTENT FOCUS ON FORCE CAPABILITIES 

AND NEW METHODOLOGIES

The limited consideration of the will to fight in 

Afghanistan and Ukraine shined a light on the United 

States’ continued focus on military force capabilities as 

a key measure of anticipated outcomes and belief that 

new tools and methodologies could fix the problem. 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff GEN Mark Milley, 

the President’s senior military advisor at the time, 

stated after the Taliban takeover: “They [the Afghan 

military] had the training, the size, the capability to 

defend their country. This comes down to an issue of 

will and leadership. And, no, I did not—nor did anyone 

else—see a collapse of an army that size in 11 days.”16

He subsequently acknowledged the need for “a really 

effective technique to read people’s hearts, their will, 

their mind, their leadership skills.”17

However, Dr. Ben Connable, the leading US researcher 

on will-to-fight analysis, noted in 2023 that—although 

the US military was interested in improving its general

understanding of will to fight as early as 2016, mainly 

through funding studies that led to the development 

of new methodologies—it resisted pursuing focused 

will-to-fight analysis of Afghanistan.18 In a 2022 

Congressional hearing on Ukraine, discussions among 

Senator Angus King, Defense Intelligence Agency 

Director LTG Scott Berrier, and Director of National 

Intelligence Avril Haines similarly demonstrated the 

limited consideration of Ukrainian will to fight in 

contrast to robust assessments of Russia’s and 

Ukraine’s relative military capabilities, while also 

implying that improved analytic approaches could 

prevent future failures.19
5

detriment of developing and applying an understanding of societal factors that shape human 

will.

26 Since World War II, the United States has exerted influence by seeking to defeat or deter 

adversaries through superior military capabilities and technology, or by improving the military 

capabilities and technologies of allies and partners through security cooperation arrangements 

involving security force assistance, foreign internal defense, and security sector assistance.27

The United States also projects its influence by working to advance notionally Western 

democratic systems, structures, and values, usually through convincing foreign leaders to make 

related reforms in their countries. Toward this end, the United States endeavors to develop 

more democratic systems of governance; promote interaction with and support for free, fair, 

and open economies; foster improved human rights; advance gender and racial equality;

expand access to food, water, and health care; expand opportunities for education; and foster 

access to fair rule of law.

Military and civilian agencies thus perceive that their core missions are to support progress 

toward these predetermined goals. Such aims align with larger national assumptions that 

developing and deploying superior military and technological capabilities to prevent adversaries 

from physically threatening US interests at home and abroad—while advancing US democratic 

values globally—makes the world a place where the United States can better coexist, compete, 

and thrive. Although many aspects of how the United States projects its influence globally are 

morally supportable, the approach rarely drives intelligence customers to want to better 

understand granular details about the will of the full range of actors whose choices and actions 

ultimately determine outcomes. Because the intelligence process is customer-driven, intelligence 

producers have little incentive to move beyond the traditional analytic focus on military and 

technological capabilities and leadership analysis to evaluate the will of all potentially relevant 

actors in places where the United States seeks to project influence.

Interagency Structure and Processes

This institutional disinterest in evaluating relevant actor will is exacerbated by how the US 

Government is organized to formulate and execute strategy. US Government structures and 

processes actively resist interagency coordination toward shared goals. The National Security 

Council (NSC) and its staff should ensure that a whole-of-government strategy is formulated 

and implemented; however, as former NSC Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan Paul D. 

Miller explains, “The United States’ national security establishment lacks an integrated 

strategic planning capability. Disparate organizations carry out strategic planning for their 

respective organizations with minimal coordination between them.” 28 Although various 

administrations have sought to empower special envoys or NSC senior directors to facilitate 

coordination, a Congressionally mandated study of the national security system concluded,

“Parochial, departmental, and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze cooperation 

even as the variety, speed, and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House 

from effectively controlling the system.” 29 Rarely found are coordinated interagency 

approaches at the strategic, operational, or tactical levels that resemble what National Defense 

University Research Fellows Christopher Lamb and Douglas Orton call “cross-functional 
6

teams,” capable of rapidly adjusting functional expertise in coordination with others toward 

resolving complex problems.30

The US Government approach to projecting influence globally thus typically manifests itself 

as the pursuit of linear progress on technocratic metrics through stove-piped, poorly integrated 

lines of effort that individual agencies are usually assigned to lead, generally within the 

categories of security, governance, and development.31 And, regardless of how positive these 

metrics—such as numbers of partner troops trained or women educated—may appear, they 

tend to be measures of performance, rather than measures of effectiveness and, therefore, give 

little consideration to their impact on the decision calculus of the various actors whose behavior 

ultimately determines outcomes. Instead, they often amount to what former National Security 

Advisor LTG H.R. McMaster described as the “confusion of activity with progress.”

32

A Way Forward for the Intelligence and Policy Communities

The cost of forgoing a holistic approach to US national security and foreign policy development 

and implementation, worsened by repeatedly paying short shrift to the impact of such 

approaches on the will of actors whose behavior impacts outcomes, signals a need for the US 

Government to change. By identifying the origins of the United States’ recurring failure to 

evaluate the human will to fight as being institutional in nature, one shifts problem resolution 

from developing better tools, technologies, and analytical methodologies to instituting 

effective organizational change. Prior scholarship on 

organizational change identifies that transformation occurs 

when institutional theories of change and success are 

adapted to accommodate the required change, and when 

standard operating procedures, force structures, and staffing 

processes are reformed to support these revised theories.33

Given the customer-driven nature of the intelligence process, 

fixing the problem would require the US Government to 

prioritize human influence over technocratic, linear progress 

within unintegrated lines of effort and adapt its standard 

operating procedures, structures, and staffing to support 

an actor-centric approach. As former Army Chief of Staff 

GEN Raymond Odierno, former Marine Corps Commandant 

Gen. James Amos, and former Commander of US Special Operations Command ADM William 

McRaven observed: “Conflict and competition are about people... [and, therefore,] influencing 

these people—be they heads of state, tribal elders, and militaries and their leaders, or even an 

entire population—remains essential to securing US interests. All elements of national power 

have an important role in these interactions with other nations and peoples.”34

Within this broader context, good strategy execution would synchronize lethal and nonlethal 

actions over time and space to create conditions that drive the decisionmaking and behavior of 

MOVING FORWARD

The US Government should prioritize human 

influence and adopt institutional reforms 

that replace technocratic, linear progress 

with a holistic, actor-centric approach...

... as the IC leans forward to initiate and 

integrate long-term, in-depth collection and 

analysis on human will and conditions that 

drive behavior supporting or countering 

US objectives.
7

all relevant actors in accordance with US objectives. Whether applying lethal force to remove 

adversaries from the battlefield, conducting negotiations with host-nation and regional 

governments, freezing an actor’s finances, training indigenous military forces, supporting 

host-nation governance, or conducting economic development, these actions would all be 

subordinate to a coordinated approach designed to shape relevant actor decisionmaking and 

behavior toward favorable outcomes, also known as measures of effectiveness.35 Only then 

will the intelligence process be able to leverage new capabilities and lessons learned over the 

past 20-plus years to generate the types of requirements and intelligence necessary to evaluate 

relevant actor will.

Additionally, the IC could rethink the relationship between intelligence producers and 

consumers.36 This approach would mandate that the IC have more leeway to initiate more longterm, in-depth intelligence production about the people in areas where the United States seeks 

to exert influence, even though such intelligence may seem irrelevant to customers at the time 

and may only prove useful in the future. Such a step could foster integration of the intelligence 

personnel who generate such production more thoroughly into US Government processes for 

policy and strategy development and for operational planning. This approach may be cause for 

concern among those who fear that closer coordination between producers and consumers of 

intelligence raises the risk of politicization.37 But it is the only way to ensure all relevant actors’

will is aggressively evaluated within the IC and thoroughly considered when national security 

decisions are being made.

Both approaches are highly invasive to current practice. Although costly in blood and treasure, 

some may conclude that this institutional blind spot for evaluating will to fight may not be 

enough of a problem to warrant the time and effort required to fix it because none of the failures 

discussed led to an existential threat to the United States. The combination of fresh wounds 

from Afghanistan and Ukraine, coupled with the importance of such analysis to a potential 

military engagement with a near-peer competitor—China—over Taiwan, however, have 

spiked interest in such improvements, making now as good a time as ever to attempt such 

change within America’s rigid, bureaucratic organizations.

Nathan White, Ph.D., completed a research fellowship at NIU’s Caracristi Institute for Intelligence 

Research. This Research Short draws on his NIU research and his dissertation for King’s College London, 

where he earned his Ph.D. in War Studies. Dr. White previously served at National Defense University

as a research fellow with the Institute for National Strategic Studies, focusing on counterterrorism, 

irregular warfare, intelligence, and interagency coordination.

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions for a Research Short topic or article, please contact 

the NIU Office of Research at NIPress@niu.odni.gov.
8

Endnotes

1 Raymond T. Odierno, James F. Amos, and William H. McRaven, “Strategic Landpower: Winning the Clash of 

Wills.” US Army Capabilities Integration Center, May 6, 2013, https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/310007.pdf.

2 R.W. Komer, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.–GVN Performance in Vietnam,” RAND 

Corporation, 1972; and Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

3 Bruce D. Berkowitz, “U.S. Intelligence Estimates of the Soviet Collapse: Reality and Perception,” International Journal 

of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 21 (2008): 237–50, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/20080229.pdf.

4 The author is indebted to Mr. Michael C. Davies of King’s College London for this observation.

5 US Department of Defense (DoD), Center for Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis (JCOA), “Decade of War 

Volume 1, Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of War,” June 15, 2012; and Joseph J. Collins and Nathan 

White, “Reflections by General David Petraeus, USA (ret.) on the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Prism 7, no. 1 

(2017): 150–67.

6 DoD/JCOA, “Decade of War Volume 1”; and General Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task (New York, NY: 

Penguin, 2013).

7 Ken Dilanian, “US Intelligence Official Acknowledges Missed Arab Spring Signs,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 

2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/07/us-intelligence-official-acknowledges-missed-signsahead-of-arab-spring-.html; and Gregory Treverton, “What Should We Expect of Our Spies?” Prospect Magazine,

May 25, 2011, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/what-should-expect-spies-intelligence-mi5-ciasoviet-union-saddam-wmd-arab-spring.

8 Ephraim Kam, “The Islamic State Surprise: The Intelligence Perspective,” Institute for National Security Studies 

Strategic Assessment 19, no. 3 (October 2015), https://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/systemfiles/

adkan18_3ENG%20(4)_Kam.pdf; and Fawaz Gerges, ISIS: A History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021).

9 Ken Dilanian, Mike Memoli, Courtney Kube, and Josh Lederman, “CIA Warned of Rapid Afghanistan Collapse. 

So Why Did U.S. Get It So Wrong?” NBC News, August 17, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nationalsecurity/cia-warned-rapid-afghanistan-collapse-so-why-did-u-s-n1277026; and Paul Shinkman, “From 300,000 

to a Few Hundred: What Happened to Afghanistan’s Army,” US News and World Report, August 18, 2021, 

https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2021-08-18/from-300-000-to-a-few-hundred-the-collapse-ofafghanistans-army.

10 US Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Full Committee Hearing To Receive Testimony on Worldwide 

Threats, 117th Cong., 2nd sess., “A Significant Issue That We Missed”—King Urges Intelligence Community to 

Assess Will to Fight,” YouTube recording, May 10, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8af7Ku-LBHg&t=59s.

11 US Congress, “A Significant Issue That We Missed.”

12 Mark Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 8th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 

2019); and DoD/US Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 2-0 Intelligence (October 23, 2013): I–6, 

https://www.moore.army.mil/infantry/doctrinesupplement/atp3-21.8/PDFs/jp2_0.pdf.

13 Montgomery McFate, Britt Damon, and Robert Holliday, “What Do Commanders Really Want to Know? U.S. 

Army Human Terrain System Lessons Learned from Iraq and Afghanistan,” in The Oxford Handbook of Military 

Psychology, eds. Janice H. Laurence and Michael D. Matthews (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012):

92–113; Michael T. Flynn, James Sisco, and David C. Ellis, ‘ “Left of Bang:’ The Value of Sociocultural Analysis 

in Today’s Environment,” Prism 3, no. 4 (2013): 13–21; Dean Bland, Enrique Camacho, and Lewis Moorhead, 

“Knowledge Development at the United States Africa Command,” American Intelligence Journal 27, no. 1 (Fall 

2009): 23–28.

14 Christopher J. Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in 

Irregular Warfare (Washington, DC: Institute of World Politics Press, 2013); Admiral Michael Mullen, “Memo to 

Chief of Staff, U.S. Army; Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force; Chief of Naval Operations; Commandant of the Marine 

Corps; Commanders of the Combatant Commands Directing the Establishment of the AFPAK Hands Program,”

August 28, 2009; “About the Cultural Support Program,” US Special Operations Command website, https://www

.soc.mil/CST/about.html; Christopher McCullough, “Female Engagement Teams: Who They Are and Why They 

Do It”, United States Army website, https://www.army.mil/article/88366/female_engagement_teams_who_

they_are_and_why_they_do_.
9

15 Lee Ellen Friedland, Gary Shaeff, and Jessica Glicken Turnley, “Socio-Cultural Perspectives: A New Intelligence 

Paradigm,” report from DoD-sponsored conference held at the MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, September 

2006, https://www.mitre.org/news-insights/publication/socio-cultural-perspectives-new-intelligence-paradigm.

16 Shinkman, “From 300,000 to a Few Hundred: What Happened to Afghanistan’s Army.”

17 US Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, “Military Leaders.”

18 Thorpe, “The RAND Will to Fight Studies.”

19 US Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, “A Significant Issue That We Missed.”

20 Friedland, Shaeff, and Turnley, “Socio-Cultural Perspectives;” MITRE Corporation, McLean VA, September 2006; 

DoD/Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Human Aspects of Military Operations, October 19, 2016; Ben 

Connable, “All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System Is Undermining Sustainable 

Military Cultural Competence,” Military Review 89, no. 2 (2009): 57–64; Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 2-

0 Intelligence; Department of the Army Headquarters and United States Marine Corps Headquarters, Field Manual 

(FM) 3-24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency, December 2006.

21 Michael C. Davies and Frank Hoffman, “Joint Force 2020 and the Human Domain: Time for a New Conceptual 

Framework?” Small Wars Journal (June 10, 2013); Odierno, Amos, and McRaven, “Strategic Landpower;” and US 

Special Operations Command, SOCOM Operational Concept for Operating in the Human Domain, August 3, 2015.

22 US Department of State, The Interagency Conflict Assessment Framework (ICAF), 2008, https://2009-

2017.state.gov/documents/organization/187786.pdf; John Agoglia, Michael Dziedzic, and Barbara Sotirin, 

“Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments (MPICE): A Metrics Framework, Version 1 Draft,” United States 

Institute of Peace (2008): 5, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/MPICE%20Aug%2008.pdf; Jason 

Alexander and James Derleth, “Stability Operations: From Policy to Practice,” Prism 2, no. 3 (2012): 134, 

https://cco.ndu.edu/Portals/96/Documents/prism/prism_2-3/Prism_125-136_Derleth-Alexander.pdf; and USAID 

Office of Military Affairs, “District Stability Framework,” PowerPoint briefing slides presented at Social Science 

Underpinnings of Complex Operations, Military Operations Research Society Mini-Symposium, Arlington, VA, 

October 18–21, 2010, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA535679.pdf; Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 2-0 

Intelligence, iii and I-4; DoD/Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Human Aspects of Military Operations; US 

Special Operations Command, SOCOM Operational Concept for Operating in the Human Domain.

23 Ben Connable et al., Will to Fight: Analyzing, Modeling, and Simulating the Will To Fight of Military Units (Santa 

Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2341.html; and Michael 

J. McNerney et al., National Will to Fight: Why Some States Keep Fighting and Others Don’t (Santa Monica, CA: 

RAND Corporation, 2018), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2477.html.

24 Tom Thorpe, “The RAND Will to Fight Studies,” Interview with Dr. Ben Connable, Combat Morale Podcast, 

August 31, 2023, https://combatmoralepod.com/podcast/s2e12-the-rand-will-to-fight-studies-dr-ben-connable/.

25 US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Full Committee Hearing on US 

Withdrawal from Afghanistan, 117th Cong., 1st sess., “Military Leaders, Gen. Milley Testify on Afghanistan Exit: 

Full House Hearing Transcript September 29,” https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/military-leaders-gen-milleytestify-on-afghanistan-exit-full-house-hearing-transcript-september-29; and Nomaan Merchant, “US Misjudged 

Ukraine's Will To Fight Russia, Officials Admit,” Associated Press, March 10, 2022, 

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-zelenskyy-nato-europe-fc52fa8b510fef79cb5505ebe8a841a8.

26 Odierno, Amos, and McRaven, “Strategic Landpower.”

27 Todd Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performance and the Institutional Dimension of Strategy in 

Afghanistan,” Journal of Strategic Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 325–56; US Department of State, Bureau of European 

and Eurasian Affairs, “U.S. Relations With Ukraine: Bilateral Relations Fact Sheet” (August 27, 2021), 

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-ukraine/; US National Security Council, “National Strategy for Victory in 

Iraq” (November 2005), https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA442621; US Department of Defense, “Report on 

Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan June 2009,” Report to Congress in Accordance with the 

2008 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1230, Public Law 110–181): 11, https://dod.defense.gov/

Portals/1/Documents/pubs/1230_June-2009Final.pdf; and Taylor White, “Security Cooperation: How it All Fits,” 

Joint Force Quarterly 72, Quarter 1 (January 2014), https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly72/Article/577493/security-cooperation-how-it-all-fits/.

28 Paul D. Miller, “Organizing the National Security Council: I Like Ike’s;” Presidential Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3 

(September 2013), https://www.jstor.org/stable/43285330.
10

29 Project on National Security Reform, “Forging a New Shield,” Center for the Study of the Presidency, November 

2008, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA491826.pdf; and Christopher Kolenda, “How Can We Avoid Losing More 

Wars? Start by Putting Somebody in Charge of Them,” Foreign Policy (January 13, 2015), http://foreignpolicy.com/

2015/01/13/how-can-we-avoid-losing-more-wars-start-by-putting-somebody-in-charge-of-them/.

30 Christopher Lamb and Doug Orton, “Interagency National Security Teams: Can Social Science Contribute?” Prism

2, no. 2 (March 2011), https://www.jstor.org/stable/26469112; and Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing, Joint 

Interagency Task Force-South: The Best Known, Least Understood Interagency Success (Washington, DC: 

National Defense University Press, 2011).

31 Kolenda, “How Can We Avoid Losing More Wars?” and US Government Accountability Office (GAO), 

Combating Terrorism: Actions Needed to Enhance Implementation of Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership,

GAO Report to the Ranking Member, Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives (July 2008), 

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08860.pdf.

32 Andrew Erdmann; “How Militaries Learn and Adapt: An Interview with Major General H.R. McMaster,” McKinsey and 

Company (April 1, 2013), https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/howmilitaries-learn-and-adapt.

33 Josh Jones, “Protecting the Mission: The Case of the US Army” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2013): 48; 

Francis G. Hoffman, “Learning While Under Fire: Military Change in Wartime” (Ph.D. diss., King’s College 

London, September 2015); Barbara Levitt and James G. March, “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of 

Sociology 14 (1988): 517; Steven Heffington, “Channeling the Legacy of Kennan: Theory of Success in Great 

Power Competition,” Modern War Institute (February 8, 2022), https://mwi.usma.edu/channeling-the-legacy-ofkennan-theory-of-success-in-great-power-competition/; Jan Osburg et al., Assessing Locally Focused Stability 

Operations, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013): xvi, 

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR300/RR387/RAND_RR387.pdf; and Stephen 

Rosen, Winning the Next War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991): 19.

34 Odierno, Amos, and McRaven, “Strategic Landpower.”

35 Nathan White, “Organizing for War: Overcoming Barriers to Whole-of-Government Strategy in the ISIL 

Campaign,” Small Wars Journal (December 28, 2014), https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/organizing-for-warovercoming-barriers-to-whole-of-government-strategy-in-the-isil-campaign#_edn5.

36 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, 3rd printing (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 

1965), 180; Robert M. Gates, “Guarding Against Politicization,” Transcript of Director of Central Intelligence 

Remarks to US Central Intelligence Agency (March 16, 1992): 6, https://www.cia.gov/static/Guarding-AgainstPoliticization.pdf; and Beth Eisenfeld, “The Intelligence Dilemma: Proximity and Politicization—Analysis of 

External Influences.” Journal of Strategic Security 10, no. 2 (2017): 77–96.

37 Eisenfeld, “The Intelligence Dilemma.”