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Introduction
The purpose of this article is to shed light on the missing pieces necessary to truly boost intelligence collection toward defeating insurgencies. The focus will be on some of the often misallocated, misunderstood, and under-utilized resources in this struggle-Civil Information Management (CIM) as gathered and stored by Civil Affairs Teams (CATs) and Civil Military Operations Centers (CMOCs). This paper will also identify how Civil Military Operations (CMO) pertain to insurgencies and many of the root causes of instability that tend to promote insurgency growth and activity. Civil Information and the management ofthat information is an untapped intelligence resource going to waste virtually everywhere that any Civil Affairs element is working because CIM integration with the Intelligence Community (1C) is virtually nonexistent.
FM 2-01.3 Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield/ Battlespace defines Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) as "a systematic process of analyzing and visualizing the portions of the mission variables of the threat/ adversary, terrain, weather, and civil considerations in a specific area of interest and for a specific mission."1 Proper IPB is conducted in four phases:
+ Define the operational/battlespace environment.
+ Describe environmental effects on operations/describe the battlespace effects.
+ Evaluate the threat/adversary.
+ Determine threat/adversary courses of action (COAs).
The constraints of combating unconventional warfare have caused the 1C to become neglectful of IPB steps 1 and 2, while simultaneously focusing too heavily and too early on IPB steps 3 and 4. The proper integration of CIM into the 1C as an augmentation to steps 1 and 2 may be one way to alleviate this "fixation" on the red target and foster a streamlined intelligence cycle. CIM has been contained in a vacuum and not integrated into the IC and other branches of the military. This lack of "cross-pollination" has proven to be a grave waste of superb resources. CIM helps to build as well as reveal networks if integrated correctly and as such could enhance the background research conducted by intelligence professionals during IPB. In order to facilitate this, the IC and CA communities must develop a system in which CA information can be translated into Intelligence Information Reports (HRs).
The Shiny Object That Never Goes Away
In 2010, Major General Michael Flynn coauthored the groundbreaking paper, "Fixing Intel: A...