Focus Targeting in a Coin Environment

Senior military leaders in Afghanistan recognize that there is a systemic problem in how our intelligence community is trained to look at the enemy and provide proper support to the military's counterinsurgency strategy. Where in the past, the intelligence community focused on enemy forces of a nation state, finding the enemy in a counterinsurgency COIN environment requires a holistic understanding of the environment. At the operational and tactical level, reaching this level of understanding requires intelligence assets to focus on the social networks and how they interrelate. Additionally, effective targeting in today's COIN environment requires a much different approach as well. Dynamic targeting models like the Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate (F3EAD) model, are extremely useful tools for rapidly processing information into useful intelligence for targeting.