Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 61

COMPLEX IPB

are like a garden, the IPB process described in Army
(and Marine Corps) doctrine focuses intelligence
analysts on the soil, weeds, and insects, instead of the
entire landscape and the interactions that made the
plants vulnerable or resilient to harm or imbalance.
Authors Tom Pike and Eddie Brown explain how
complex IPB could improve IPB in a March 2016
article in Small Wars Journal.6 According to Pike and
Brown, “Using IPB as the nucleus and integrating
concepts from complex adaptive systems theory
generates Complex IPB.”7 Instead of primarily identifying and evaluating the enemy or the threat, the
complex IPB process helps intelligence staffs analyze
multiple groups and how they interact and collectively behave. Like the hybrid and dynamic threats it was
developed to defeat, complex IPB combines conventional and innovative approaches that emphasize cultural and population factors, perception assessments,
and analysis of nonmilitary actors in order to create
a more accurate understanding of the OE. Therefore,
complex IPB expands the core process to include sociocultural profiling, link and social network analysis,
and computational agent-based models. Although
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2017

A Ukrainian soldier assigned to 1st Battalion, 80th Airmobile Brigade, looks for simulated enemy activity 14 November 2016 during
an urban operations training exercise taught by soldiers assigned to
6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat
Team, 3rd Infantry Division, as part of the Joint Multinational Training Group–Ukraine at the International Peacekeeping and Security
Center in Yavoriv, Ukraine. (Photo by Sgt. Jacob Holmes, U.S. Army)

complex IPB has not been employed widely enough
to validate its effectiveness, it can help staffs develop
a more comprehensive picture of the OE than can
doctrinal IPB alone.
According to Pike and Brown, “complex IPB is the
next-generation of IPB … [that could] dramatically
improve foreign population analysis as well as improve U.S. ability to influence foreign populations.”8
The six steps of complex IPB are—
1. Define the OE.
2. Describe fitness landscape effects.
3. Evaluate the major groups.
4. Evaluate major groups’ courses of action.
5. Assess the groups’ interaction.
6. Evaluate population behavior.9
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