Our Capabilities
ISW’s comparative advantage comes from synergistic capabilities it has cultivated throughout its history. Learn more about what powers ISW’s breakout talent and insight.
capability 1
open-source intelligence
ISW is a leader in open-source intelligence. ISW analytical teams perform a full intelligence cycle from strictly non-classified sources to produce accurate, granular, and timely intelligence to many audiences, including US and allied decision-makers. ISW’s methodology reflects best practices and analytic tradecraft standards drawn from the US intelligence community and adapted to the unclassified environment.
ISW has innovative ways of approaching open-source intelligence that differentiate its work.
- ISW’s open source intelligence produces analytical assessments and forecasts, not just information or investigations.
- ISW like the intelligence community presents assessments with a confidence level to help readers interpret the insights.
- ISW presents citations to the sources from which its insights are derived so that readers can independently assess the same information.
- ISW analysts rigorously characterize their source material.
ISW products do not simply report facts but rather interpret available and sometimes conflicting data to form intelligence assessments regarding what is occurring, has occurred, and could occur, and their implications.
Many of ISW’s product lines are ongoing running assessments of a war or threat. ISW engages in timely forecasting and predictive analysis to provide advance warning about potential risks and opportunities for the United States, its partners, and allies. ISW explicitly states its specific confidence level in each assessment whenever applicable to help the user interpret the analysis effectively.
Timely, strategic insight
ISW teams complete daily intelligence cycles to publish maps and insights, often daily. ISW also produces holistic assessments based on ISW’s longitudinal study of an actor or conflict zone.
ISW produces a rich variety of intelligence products to inform decision-makers and public discourse, including:
- Running assessments and maps of ongoing military campaigns
- Orders of Battle of adversary armed forces
- Assessments of adversary strategic intent, diplomatic negotiations, and campaign design
- Analysis of the character of contemporary and future war
- Warnings and forecasts of adversary behavior or potential threats.
Policy Impact
ISW’s capacity to generate high-fidelity, timely, intelligence assessments from openly available sources enables ISW to:
- Empower US and allied decision-makers with important, timely insights as crises unfold;
- Enable policymakers and media to understand the context and purpose driving key events;
- Enable US, allied, and partnered leaders to speak publicly on important national security issues informed by published, unclassified insights;
- Narrow the gap of understanding between national capitals, leaders in-theater, and frontline forces;
- Raise the quality of public discourse by providing journalists and media outlets access to high-quality, timely, and fully cited assessments;
- Inform democratic citizens about national security issues that affect their world.
capability 2
Conflict Mapping
ISW makes a signature contribution to global discourse and US and allied decision making through its world-class conflict mapping. ISW maps of the war in Ukraine are utilized by world leaders, military and intelligence professionals, and media organizations that broadcast to millions daily.
Ukrainian Minister for Communities and Territories Development Oleksiy Chernyshov shows a wartime map to French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis (partially obscured) during their visit, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Irpin, near Kyiv, Ukraine June 16, 2022. REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
ISW has produced high-fidelity maps to enable US and allied decision makers since ISW’s establishment in 2007. ISW’s historic map series include:
- Counterinsurgency operations in Iraq 2007-2011
- ISIS Control of Terrain in Iraq and Syria and counter-ISIS operations
- Control of Terrain in Syria’s Civil War
- Russian Airstrikes in Syria’s Civil War
- Detailed maps of Afghanistan at key stages of NATO operations
Geospatial intelligence
ISW established a new geospatial intelligence program at ISW to meet the demands posed by the Ukraine war in 2022. ISW’s Geospatial team is now a discrete entity that works in support of ISW’s analytic team, providing granular tracking and visualization of the war that informs the assessments ISW analysts produce. This configuration – a mapping team in support of an analytic team – represents a consolidation of ISW’s traditional approach to analyzing conflicts and will enable ISW to continue to achieve greater scale by applying this tradecraft to new portfolios, including China. It also enables ISW’s ongoing innovation of new mapping approaches.
Enabling Humanitarian Organizations and NGOs
ISW’s conflict mapping and GEOINT capacity enable humanitarian organizations and NGOs that perform difficult and often high-risk operations in conflict zones and terrain controlled by hostile actors. ISW’s maps provide a granular baseline assessment of areas of control and of the locations of active military operations which can layer into established processes for scoping the locations and conduct of humanitarian operations.
Humanitarian organizations use ISW map layers to support:
- Assessment of Crop Yields
- Demining and Removal of Unexploded Ordnances
- War Crimes Investigations
- Damage to protected cultural heritage sites
Public examples of ISW map layers utilized by humanitarian organizations, government officials, NGOs, and the media include those below:
ISW’s data and analysis featured in key visual platforms: (Left) NASA highlights ISW and Harvest data on unharvested Ukrainian crops near the front line; (Center) House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul used ISW–CTP’s map of Russian military and security bases within range of US-provided weapons during a congressional hearing with Secretary Blinken; (Right) Near-infrared imagery reveals flood damage to Russian defenses along the Dnipro River on June 7, 2023, as cited in the New York Times and other media outlets.
capability 3
Innovation
ISW innovates new ways of collecting, analyzing, and visualizing public data in order to answer intelligence questions essential for US and allied decision-making.
ISW envisions a revolution in open-source intelligence. The information age has transformed the nature of the intelligence fight. New social media platforms, commercially available data, censorship and disinformation efforts, automation tools and other software all pose new and interesting analytic challenges and opportunities for studying conflict. Disinformation and misreporting further complicate accuracy. The old fight was for information. The new fight is for understanding and it will take an intelligence revolution to win it.
ISW contributes to this revolution by demonstrating the potential of open-source methodologies, beta testing emerging technologies that enable intelligence collection and analysis and innovating at the intersection between human analysts and technology.
capability 4
Forecasting
ISW’s strict independence allows ISW to set its own research priorities and pivot quickly before and after major geo-strategic inflections even when US policy priorities do not align. ISW teams maintain a constant stare on their portfolios and rapidly detect change. As a result, ISW is able to produce high-quality,useful forecasts that often illuminate gaps in the US intelligence picture.
ISW produces three forms of forecasts:
- Early warning: ISW publishes early warning forecasts when its analysts judge an issue to be sufficiently important, timely, or risky to warrant a flag. These early warnings provide a valuable means of scoping the aperture of decision-makers during fast-moving events, strategic surprises, and amidst highly contested information environments. ISW follows the warnings with further updates as the situation develops.
- Courses of Action: A forecast that identifies ranges of possible actions from most likely to most dangerous that an actor or group of actions is likely to take based on their objectives, their capabilities, and the situational environment in which they’re operating.
- Trajectory: A synthetic assessment of the trajectory of a conflict or threat, often with a range of likely to dangerous outcomes and an identification of key variables or thresholds that will affect the outcome.
Major ISW forecasting successes include:
- ISW warned that ISIS would attempt to seize territorial control in Iraq, collapse the Iraqi security forces, and highlighted that Mosul was vulnerable seven months before ISIS launched its blitz offensive in June 2014.
- ISW warned that the global coalition against ISIS was united only on the military defeat of ISIS and not the political aftermath, precluding regional stability, in January 2016, seven months before Turkey launched a war against the US partner in Syria and a year and nine months before Iran launched its next bid for power in Iraq in October 2017.
- ISW warned that Russia would deploy Russian troops to Belarus in the aftermath of major protests in Minsk August 2020 – months before Russia began assembling its invasion force to invade Ukraine from Belarus in 2021.
capability 5
Planning Exercises
ISW conducts unclassified planning exercises, often joined by research partners such as the Critical Threats Project at AEI. ISW and CTP conducted a rigorous planning exercise to recommend policy options for combating ISIS following the 2015 Paris Attack. ISW used a simlar methodology in 2020-2021 to develop policy options to respond to Russia.
The planning exercise (PLANEX) methodology that ISW uses is based on the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) that the US military uses to develop operations orders. The US Army describes that process as “an iterative planning methodology that integrates the activities of the commander, staff, subordinate headquarters, and other partners to understand the situation and mission, develop and compare courses of action (COAs), decide on a COA that best accomplishes the mission, and produce an operation plan or order for execution.”1 ISW does not produce concrete operations plans or orders, of course, but generates operational concepts intended to inform and shape the development of such concrete plans and orders by military staffs and the relevant non-military US government agencies.
An ISW PLANEX proceeds in five main phases:
- Defining the mission that must be accomplished to achieve vital US national security objectives;
- Understanding the situation relevant to that mission, specifically including the political, military, and economic capabilities of the actors involved and assessing the adversary’s objectives and intentions;
- Developing an array of possible course of action (COAs) that the US and its coalition partners could pursue to accomplish the defined mission within the constraints of the assessed situation;
- Choosing the most promising 2-5 of those COAs based on assessments and wargaming; and
- Developing one or more specific strategic approaches the US and is coalition partners could use based on these COAs.
This PLANEX process helps ISW develop its intelligence cycle, highlight topics requiring further intelligence assessments, seek expert inputs into its recommendations, and discuss those recommendations with stakeholders.
1. “MDMP Handbook,” Center for Lessons Learned, 15-06_0.pdf (army.mil), p. 7.
capability 6
Leadership Development
ISW develops leaders to deepen the bench of national security talent and raise the caliber of the debate.
Two core competencies underpin ISW’s leadership development:
1. Military History and Civics Classroom Education.
The profession of war studies underpins both ISW’s analytic program and its educational efforts. ISW’s founder and president Dr. Kimberly Kagan is a military historian and ISW’s senior leaders include other historians, general officers, and military experts.
ISW launched a novel War Studies Program for undergraduates and recent graduates in 2013 that immerses approximately 20 students in a rigorous study of the theory and history of warfare. The program develops students personally and professionally as a cohort.
Past programs have included:
- The Bosnian War and The Responsibility to Protect
- Russian Hybrid War
- Ideology of Al Qaeda and ISIS
- Generalship
- Civil-Military Relations
2. Staff Rides.
ISW offers students, staff, and donors the opportunity to join professional staff rides to immerse themselves in the study of military operations on the terrain in which battles were fought. ISW makes available to civilians the value of military staff rides in which units visit a historical battle or campaign site to study the terrain, the decision-making by commanders on both sides from the grand strategic level of war to the minute tactics, and the lessons to be learned from past military operations.
The staff ride experience not only deepens participants’ understanding of war as a human phenomenon but also connects the participants as a cohort through intense study and reflection. The students and faculty discuss human factors, emotions, resilience, unit cohesion, and the moral and ethical decisions leaders face, topics equally applicable to military and civilian leadership.
ISW staff rides have included:
- Single-day trips to Civil War battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, and the Overland Campaign
- Week-plus long international trips covering major campaigns from World War II
