the future would be diffuse. It would take place in cities as
often as on battlefields, be fueled by ideas as much as by
weapons, and engage cultures and economies as much as
armies. As one JFCOM analyst puts it: “The next war is not just
going to be military on military. The deciding factor is not
going to be how many tanks you kill, how many ships you sink,
and how many planes you shoot down. The decisive factor is
how you take apart your adversary’s system. Instead of going
after war-fighting capability, we have to go after war-making
capability. The military is connected to the economic system,
which is connected to their cultural system, to their personal
relationships. We have to understand the links between all
those systems.”
With Millennium Challenge, then, Blue Team was given
greater intellectual resources than perhaps any army in history.
JFCOM devised something called the Operational Net
Assessment, which was a formal decision-making tool that
broke the enemy down into a series of systems — military,
economic, social, political — and created a matrix showing how
all those systems were interrelated and which of the links
among the systems were the most vulnerable. Blue Team’s
commanders were also given a tool called Effects-Based