The Defense Intelligence Agency has built a systematic framework for evaluating whether a foreign military force will hold together and fight under pressure — a judgment that intelligence analysts and operational planners have long struggled to quantify, according to Breaking Defense. The methodology, described in detail for the first time, reflects a broader institutional push to treat will to fight not as an intangible afterthought but as a structured, assessable variable alongside more conventional measures of military capability. The stakes are considerable: misjudging an adversary’s cohesion has derailed U.S. strategic calculations in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, a pattern that a policy paper warned about as recently as last year.

The DIA’s approach draws on a range of indicators spanning leadership quality, unit cohesion, ideological motivation, logistical sustainability, and the relationship between a force and the population it represents. Breaking Defense reports that analysts score these indicators across multiple tiers, enabling a composite picture rather than a single binary verdict. The framework is designed to be applied to both state militaries and non-state armed groups, reflecting the varied threat environments U.S. planners must navigate.

Why Structured Assessment Matters Now

The urgency behind formalizing this methodology is not academic. The collapse of Afghan security forces in 2021 — despite years of U.S. training, equipment, and funding — stands as the most immediate institutional lesson. Afghan units that appeared capable on paper disintegrated within days once political and logistical support evaporated. The DIA’s framework is, in part, an attempt to surface the warning signs of such collapse before they materialize on the battlefield rather than after.

Officials involved in developing the methodology have also pointed to the war in Ukraine as a more recent data point in both directions. Ukrainian forces demonstrated a level of resistance that most pre-invasion assessments underestimated, while elements of Russian forces showed morale and cohesion problems that took months to fully register in Western intelligence products. Both cases underscored that order-of-battle analysis alone — counting tanks, aircraft, and personnel — provides an incomplete picture of what a force will actually do when engaged.

How the Framework Is Applied

According to Breaking Defense’s reporting, the DIA methodology disaggregates will to fight into component variables that can be weighted and tracked over time. Leadership effectiveness — including the degree to which commanders retain the confidence of their subordinates and political principals — is treated as a primary driver. Unit cohesion, which encompasses factors such as shared identity, training history, and internal discipline, forms a second major pillar. Analysts also examine a force’s relationship to external sustainment: a unit that is well-armed but dependent on fragile supply chains or external political backing scores differently than one with organic resilience.

The framework also incorporates assessments of ideological and political motivation — how strongly a force’s members identify with the cause they are fighting for — and the degree to which civilian populations provide or withhold active support. Breaking Defense notes that the methodology is not static; it is intended to be updated as conditions change, allowing analysts to track whether a force’s will is degrading or consolidating over the course of a campaign. How the DIA integrates these assessments into finished intelligence products shared with combatant commands and senior policymakers was not fully detailed in the reporting, and officials have not confirmed the precise classification level at which the framework operates.

The disclosure arrives as great-power competition reshapes the threat environment U.S. intelligence agencies must evaluate. Assessing the will to fight of a technologically advanced peer competitor — one whose military culture, civil-military relations, and political system differ fundamentally from those of the irregular adversaries that dominated U.S. attention for two decades — represents a qualitatively different analytical challenge than the counterinsurgency cases that informed earlier iterations of this kind of work.