RAND Corporation. May 3, 2012.

The U.S. Department of Defense will receive more detailed, transparent and credible assessments of its counterinsurgency campaigns by replacing its top-down approach with a bottom-up method driven by contextual, narrative reporting provided by commanders on the ground, according to a new RAND Corporation report. The study finds that “contextual assessment”—which replaces standardized and aggregated quantitative metrics with a nested mix of qualitative and quantitative data and commanders’ input from the battalion to the theater level—is a superior way to gauge the success or failure of COIN operations. Indeed, in late 2011 after the study was completed the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan began developing and implementing an improved COIN assessment methodology. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1086.pdf [PDF format, 342 pages].