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UNTIL 14 AUGUST 2008, the American military's Joint world was well on the road to formulating a doctrine called "effects-based operations" (EBO). However, the EBO effort's trajectory was brought to a sudden abatement when Marine Corps General James N. Mattis, commander of Joint Forces Command, announced the untimely death of all "effectsbased" terms of art. Effects-based operations had attempted to describe the practice of predicting effects in the physical and moral dimensions of war and the subsequent targeting to produce them. This "effects-based approach to operations" (EBAO) remains a NATO policy that focuses on the whole of government - a comprehensive interagency approach to operations. NATO's EBAO does not evoke the same assumption sets that EBO does, but it does possess the same fundamental logic. The U.S. military has been training and practicing along these lines for some time, and substantially continues to do so. The mind-set behind EBO persists in planning circles throughout the U.S. military, and the mind-set looms behind any effort to conduct U.S. whole-of-government operations as well. This approach, by whatever name, has little potential to accommodate important moral concerns that have proven to have strategic ramifications, and I therefore want to critique the effectsbased perspective to drive more nails into its coffin.
The EBO mind-set fundamentally lacks any moral quality because it fails at the level of theory. The practitioners of effects-based thinking profess many assertions and defend their methods at the level of doctrine. But, while EBO advocates were busy writing its doctrine, they failed to pay attention to its theory. While their emphasis on systems thinking was well-intentioned, these systems zealots failed to pay attention to the philosophical nuances between mechanical and living systems.' The presumed theory underlying the effectsbased approach rests on several philosophical mistakes:
* Metaphysical errors relating to ontological assumptions and facts of existence.
* Epistemological errors relating to gaining knowledge and matters of mind.
* Logical errors in drawing conclusions from the evidence available.
The mind-set underlying EBAO has become, and remains, a strategic liability. It will be so, as long as faith in its theoretical foundations persists.
Doctrine can change by fiat, but it is the underlying conceptual milieu that matters here. We should expect mistakes as a result of a practice resting...