Developing a Tool to Enhance Decision Making Skills in the PMESII Typology

Combat profiling requires that decision makers perceive and integrate cues within a complex battle space. To facilitate the planning and decision making process, combat profilers must understand the system in which their adversary is operating. A system is comprised of dynamic, interdependent variables that interact with one another and assists military planners and intelligence analysts in determining the adversary's parameters, capabilities, and threat vulnerabilities. The approach for understanding critical vulnerabilities involves consideration of the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Information (PMESII) resources available to adversaries. The PMESII typology was explicitly developed to identify the key components of enemies and is the focal content for the Combat Hunter Training Program. Studies have linked the PMESII typology and Irregular Warfare to a decision making framework. The Combat Hunter training program is an example of these decision making processes and is informed by an understanding of both human behavior and the PMESII typology. To better train for skills within this typology, training designers must leverage the training and decision making research appropriately. To address this gap, we conducted a literature review to identify and extract best practices for developing decision making skills for combat profilers. Based upon these extractions, we mapped the content of these best practices onto applicable PMESII dimensions. To that end, there are four major aims of this paper: 1) detail our efforts of linking these best practices for developing decision making skills to specific PMESII components necessary for combat profiling, 2) provide examples of how these suggestions may be practically realized, 3) describe and showcase the most comprehensive knowledge base of PMESII tools that enable simulations that use the typology and 4) describe the development of an automated tool designed to enhance decision making skills for combat profiling that is based upon this conceptual "program of instruction".