Improving Cognitive Effectiveness in Counterinsurgency Operational Planning

摘要

This paper describes a new software system that is designed to facilitate the cognitive processes of theoperational planning team in counterinsurgency (COIN) environments. COIN environments pose manycognitive challenges to the operational planner; planners must maintain situation awareness, reason withnumerous factors in the decision making process, and coordinate actions across echelons to ensure thatlong term goals are being met. The software system, called the Decision Infrastructure forCounterinsurgency Operational Planning (DICOP), provides an analytical framework for the operationalplanner that meets many of the cognitive challenges faced by the planning staff. DICOP provides a methodfor organizing and tracking relevant situational data, visualizing and modeling operational factors tofacilitate decision making, and identifying and planning courses of action. These methods for improvingcognitive effectiveness and the current field evaluation of DICOP in Iraq are discussed.