PDFS: Complex Environments (or, how govt assesses social terrain of insurgents)

[The Straight Story]

Complex Environments – An Alternative Approach to the Assessment of Insurgencies and their Social Terrain, Part 1: Identifying Decisive Factors 22 pages November 24, 2009 Download

Complex Environments – An Alternative Approach to the Assessment of Insurgencies and Their Social Terrain, Part 2: Constraint-Based Analytic Procedures 31 pages March 31, 2010

Snips:

Explanations of behavior based on nothing more than culture, group affiliation, identity,
motives, personality, attitudes, values, or ideology rely on circular argumentation, provide no
decision advantage to commanders and policymakers, and often lack the support of empirical
evidence. (High Confidence)

Consistent exposure to two types of constraints make behavior explainable and predictable
without the need to identify motivation because all people react psychologically to these two
constraints in the same way. (High Confidence)

References to an individual cause (for example, a "profit motive," an "authoritarian personality,"
or "collectivist values") rely on circular reasoning. The only way to identify the cause is to identify its
supposed behavioral outcome: for example, we know the person wants to get rich (has a profit
motive) because he is seen trying to get rich, so saying that he tries to get rich because he wants to
get rich has no analytic value. Using the individual cause to explain the behavior only restates what is
already known.

http://publicintelligence.net/u-s-army-complex-environments-insurgency-assessment-and-social-terrain-analysis-reports/