Obstacles to Effective Anticipation and Response

This appendix draws heavily on the literature of warning and surprise and of military and technological innovation to assess Army intelligence’s tools for supporting the Army Strategic Planning System. Warning, surprise, and innovation are good analogues to use to evaluate Army intelligence assets for their appropriateness in support of the proposed decision-based planning system, for several reasons. First, long-range planning is all about anticipating trouble and taking appropriate steps to respond to it. The warning and surprise literature studies the same problem while emphasizing the causes of failure in the past: the organizational, perceptional, and other factors that have allowed surprise and failed to produce credible warning. Second, ACQ and FD are especially concerned with technical and military innovation and the weapons and foreign military capabilities that such innovation may produce. The innovation literature should help establish the degree to which Army intelligence is likely to be able to improve its ability to spot signs of foreign innovation useful for ACQ and FD purposes.