Intel under fire

Can enhanced analytics, including operations research, help win the war in Afghanistan?

That remains to be seen, but a blistering report authored by Maj. Gen.Michael Flynn, the senior intelligence officer for Afghanistan and
the surrounding region, implies that the current intel effort in the war-torn country needs significant improvement.

The remarkably candid report, released in January, included several pointed declarations and observations, such as: “In a recent project ordered by the White House, analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts. It is little wonder, then, that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain ‘ground truth.’”

And this: “An NGO wanting to build a water well in a village may learn, as we recently did, about some of the surprising risks encountered by others who have attempted the same project. For instance, a foreign-funded well constructed in the center of a village in southern Afghanistan was destroyed – not by the Taliban – but by the village’s women. Before, the women had to walk a long distance to draw water from a river, but this was exactly what they wanted.The establishment of a village well deprived them of their only opportunity to gather socially with other women.”

Someone didn’t ask the right questions and do some homework and legwork in the village before they started digging.Was this a military intel failure or just a failure to communicate? Given the complicated, fluid, asymmetric warfare going on in Afghanistan, the line between the two is blurry at best.

While the report has been out for about six months and received some mainstream press at the time, Doug Samuelson takes a fresh look at it from an O.R. analyst’s perspective for this month’s cover story (“Changing the war with analytics,” page 30). Samuelson points out that while the report doesn’t mention “operations research” explicitly, Maj. Gen. Flynn and his co-authors are definitely calling for more of the stuff that O.R. folks are supposed to do best: find patterns in voluminous information, figure out how to use those patterns to direct better decision-making, and determine how to organize to do a better job of collecting and utilizing information.

Samuelson, a longtime and prolific contributor to OR/MS Today, may have outdone himself this issue. Along with the cover story, Samuelson writes a “Forum” piece (page 16) that argues that it’s time for O.R. and INFORMS to jump on the “analytics”bandwagon, but in the right way. He also delivers his familiar “Oracle”column (page 64).

The war in Afghanistan and Iraq continues to be a major story in the mainstream media, and – since the military was the first and remains one of the largest consumers and employers of O.R. – we plan to continue our coverage of military matters from an O.R. perspective in OR/MS Today in the months and years ahead.

Another ongoing story in the mainstream media is health care. If anything, the health care bill passed by Congress earlier this year only added fuel to the fire, and the hot topic of health care is sure to be an issue during the fall mid-term elections.However, as Eva Lee points out in her article “Advancing health care on multiple fronts” (page 20), Republicans and Democrats do agree on one thing: health care technology is crucial to improving any health care system.