Pentagon reveals factors that it considers when determining allies and adversaries’ ‘will to fight’

One of the fundamental questions the Pentagon continuously grapples with is the determination of allies’ and adversaries’ willingness to fight in a conflict — an intangible, unquantifiable assessment that could prove fatal if incorrect.There are a plethora of factors that can impact the analysis: the stakes of the conflict, what triggered it, how it is perceived by enemies, morale, and the objective, just to name a few. Each of them could hold different weights to various entities, and there is a “will to fight” assessment for both military leaders as well as the forces under them who could be on the front lines.The Defense Intelligence Agency released a “Analyzing Will to Fight” framework last week. A press release noted that “this guidance is designed to support intelligence community analysis,” and said its public release is a part of an effort to inform Americans about challenges and threats to U.S. national security. The difficulties of correctly assessing a force’s willingness to fight were on display this decade with the collapse of the Afghan Army and Ukraine’s stout defenses against Russia’s full-scale invasion, both of which went against the military and intelligence community’s expectations based on their perceptions of both military’s wills.“Will to fight can change quickly, dramatically, and many times over the course of a conflict for each party to the conflict,” the framework said. “Will to Fight is one of the most challenging elements of military capability analysis because of its fundamentally intangible nature.”Analyzing a military’s willingness to fight “is one of several factors” into a larger assessment about “military capabilities.”It’s much harder to determine the lengths to which a military is willing to go to win a conflict compared to looking at adversaries’ arsenals and seeing the number of aircraft they have and what condition they’re in, for example.A spokesperson for the DIA told Defense Scoop it released the framework near the fifth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was completed on Aug. 30, 2021.In the summer of 2021, the U.S. military expected the Afghan Army, which it helped train, would be able to hold off a growing Taliban movement as the United States prepared to exit the country after 20 years of war. The Afghan Army and the Ghani government ultimately put down their weapons, then-President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the U.S. left with the Taliban back in power in Kabul, as they were in 2001 when the U.S. invaded.The U.S. made the opposite prediction leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Most experts, U.S. officials included, believed it would only take a handful of days for Russian forces to push into Kyiv and conquer the capital.February 2027 will mark five years since the full-scale invasion began. After the Ukrainians were able to hold Russia off in the early months, the Russians had to change their objectives and reconfigure their efforts to capture a large chunk of eastern Ukraine, which they have yet to conquer completely.NEW HEGSETH COUNTER-DRONE HOMELAND SECURITY MEMO SAYS ‘ACCEPT PRUDENT RISKS’ BUT DON’T ‘CUT CORNERS’In 2024, then-DIA chief Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse said, “The Ukrainians … exhibited a will to fight that was far beyond anything any of us had estimated.” In light of the incorrect pre-war judgment, Kruse said at the time that, “The team went through and built a ‘will to fight’ all-source tradecraft methodology [to ask], ‘What does that look like? How do we assess what that looks like?”The DIA’s recently released framework emerged from that review.