PMESII / ASCOPE Analysis with Sintelix
Sintelix accelerates PMESII/ASCOPE analysis and integrates it with Systems Analysis.
PMESII / ASCOPE (alternatively ASCOPE-PMESII) analysis is integral to both JIPOE (Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (OE)) and IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield) intelligence processes. It is one of several topic-based frameworks for understanding the Operational Environment (see sidebar).
PMESII / ASCOPE analysis appears as a requirement of Step 2 of the JIPOE process (“describe the impact of the OE”). The second requirement of Step 2 is to develop a systems perspective of the OE. The systems perspective studies the OE as a system of interacting entities. ASCOPE is a list of core entity types relevant in Systems Analysis, and PMESII is a subcategorization of ASCOPE entities.
Sintelix enables Systems Analysis using PMESII/ASCOPE entities and considerations to be carried out easily and naturally.
Other Topic Frameworks for Intel. Prep.
Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement
SWEAT-MSO: Infrastructure assessment
Sewer, Water, Electricity, Academics,
Trash, Medical, Safety, and Other
METT-TC: Situation assessment
Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops, Time, and Civilians
PMESII-PT: Operational variables
Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information, Physical environment, Time
SWOT: Decision Analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats
PMESII
PMESII analysis covers Nation State Resources; but it can be also applied to non-state actors. It includes the following categories:
P – Political
M – Military
E – Economic
S – Social
I – Information
I – Infrastructure
An entity may have multiple categories; for example, a person may control a large budget and reside in both the M and E categories.
Within the US Army’s Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield process, this list is extended by two further factors to become PMESII-PT, where P = Physical Environment and T = Time. The US DoD has also provided a simple template for PMESII-PT analysis, an easy introduction to the technique.
ASCOPE
ASCOPE analysis covers Civil Considerations and includes the following entity types:
A – Areas
S – Structure
C – Capabilities
O – Organizations
P – People
E – Events
The ASCOPE entity types are covered by Sintelix’s native entity types: Location (Areas and Structures), Organisation, Person, Events. Capabilities are covered by finer grain entity types such as Weapon, Vehicle and Aircraft.
PMESII-ASCOPE in Detail
The US Army field manual Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield provides an overview of some elements of a full-blown PMESII-ASCOPE analysis in the form of the PMESII-ASCOPE matrix, below.
(Click to expand)
(Click to expand)
The Intelligence Preparation Process:
Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment
Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (Army)
The driver of the Intelligence Preparation process is the need to gain a holistic understanding the Battlefield or Operational Environment (OE), predicting the Courses of Action (CoA) of other actors, and optimizing one’s own CoA. Intel Prep continues throughout mission planning and execution. At a high level, both the Joint process (JIPOE) and the force-level process (IPB) process have the same pattern, as shown above.
Both the JIPOE and IPB processes aim at developing plans that are likely to work. Each process divides between understanding the environment (OE or Battlefield), understanding how the other actors are likely to behave and designing our own (blue force) CoA that will reliably gain good results. Without a thorough understanding of the OE, probable other force and effective blue force CoA’s cannot be hypothesized.
Commanders need to beware that the intelligence preparation process tends to focus on the direct mission goal while ignoring broader and longer-term mission effects. This tunnel vision effect tends to increase with operational tempo and cultural distance. This problem can be mitigated by including sufficient research in the intelligence preparation process to predict the likely wider effects of mission CoAs.
The JIPOE and IPB processes naturally focus on Actors and their Courses of Action (CoAs). This naturally leads to Geospatial Analysis, Systems Analysis and the analysis of their impact potential courses of action. Systems Analysis is guided by the context, including the aspects of the OE covered by PMESII-ASCOPE.
The Intelligence Cycle and PMESII-ASCOPE Analysis
The Intelligence Cycle
The intelligence cycle (also known as the intelligence process) is more narrowly focused. While JIPOE and IPB are heavily concerned with Course of Action analysis, the Intelligence Process is about providing the information needed for that analysis. Within JIPOE, PMESII-ASCOPE is the content of the Intelligence Process. ASCOPE defines the entities and PMESII defines the topics.
A well-organised intelligence process (IP) will efficiently and effectively provide the information needed to plan and execute the mission. The six main stages of the Intelligence Process are:
- Planning and Direction – organizing and directing the other stages and responsively contributing to the JIPOE/IPB process.
- Collection – collecting new data and gathering information from existing resources.
- Processing and Exploitation – receiving, collating, reviewing, and analyzing the collected data and making it available for analysis and production; extracting information from the data.
- Analysis and Production – developing and answering the key questions, packaging operational data for effective mission use and creating the intelligence products required by the mission commander.
- Dissemination and Integration – distributing intelligence products and integrating intelligence findings effectively within the mission planning and execution process.
- Evaluation and Feedback continuous evaluation and update of intelligence products to ensure that they are current and fit for purpose – timely, accurate, usable, complete, objective, and relevant.
Accelerating The Intelligence Cycle with Sintelix
As an intelligence tool ideal for PMESII-ASCOPE analysis, Sintelix accelerates the Intelligence Process at every stage:
- Planning and Direction – after the first iteration of the IP, the intelligence products created by Sintelix guide the mission commander in planning the next iteration. He/she is clear what information is still needed and what new requirements have arisen.
- Collection – Sintelix can ingest both structured and unstructured data. It can harvest the web and gather information from internal systems either automatically or under user supervision. Sintelix has the ability to capture news and social media from across the world (via Global Eye).
- Processing and Exploitation – Sintelix extracts named entities (People, Locations, Organisations, etc.), relationships and many other items of information and builds a single coherent knowledge graph of it all to provide the feedstock information for visualisation, analysis, and intelligence product creation.
- Analysis and Production – Sintelix provides large numbers of analytical tools (Capabilities), including advanced search, topic analysis, node and link tables, link charts, timelines, question-answering, etc. The results of analysis are most easily provided to commanders and colleagues via automatically generated reports, which can be edited in Word and PowerPoint.
- Dissemination and Integration – Intelligence products can be shared within Sintelix or downloaded and copied into email or your repository of choice. Sintelix integrates with hundreds of other systems, including, databases, i2 Analyst’s Notebook, i2 iBase and many more.
- Evaluation and Feedback – evaluation and correction of intelligence products is speeded by Sintelix’s ability to automatically integrate potentially relevant new and changed data. Review of such changes is facilitated through immediate visibility and the ability to edit system information and reports.
The experience we have is that Sintelix saves so much time that analysts have the opportunity to do their jobs rapidly at high quality. The benefits Sintelix provides are:
- Collection is largely automatic; therefore, rapid and consistent.
- Processing and Exploitation is almost entirely automatic and very fast.
- The analytical tools Sintelix provides are able to provide the information and insights that analysts need without having to try to correlate data between multiple applications.
- Custom report templates can be created to improve yet further the quality and productivity of the intelligence process.
Experience Sintelix PMESII / ASCOPE Analysis
Glossary
- ASCOPE – Civil Considerations (Areas, Structures, Capabilities, Organizations, People, Events)
- CoA – Course of Action
- COIN – Counter Insurgency
- IPB – Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield
- JIPOE – Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environnment
- OE – Operational Environment
- PMESII – Nation State Resource categorization (Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure)
Customer Feedback
"We now have a cohesive set of intelligence tools delivering time savings and enhanced capabilities and we can now access and analyse data in ways that were not previously possible. Intelligence analysts from across UK Defence can now easily share data, produce intelligence and collaborate on projects."
– Representative of Ministry of Defence, United Kingdom
"Delivered results were excellent. A field accuracy of 99.7% was achieved, which is significantly greater that IPA would expect from human transcription. The project was performed on time and on budget. IP Australia enjoyed a positive experience of working with Semantic Sciences Research and using Sintelix."
– Patent Search Capability Coordinator, IP Australia
Solutions
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