Stop Building the Enemy’s Biography

By Juan Pablo Vivaldi Remy

Every staff I have served on eventually does the same thing when intelligence grows thin: someone starts building the enemy’s biography. We compile grievances, humiliations, and a decade of patterns, then ask what behavior that history should produce. The process feels rigorous and fills slides. However, when the adversary acts unexpectedly, we work backward like lawyers, searching the biography for an explanation. A long enough history can explain anything after the fact, and that is the problem. An explanation that accommodates every outcome predicts none. There is another way to reason about an adversary, and, strangely, our own doctrine already requires it. We were never taught the psychology that makes it work.

Read the doctrine, then ask what kind of enemy it describes.

Look at the vocabulary we hand every field-grade officer: desired end state, commander’s intent, center of gravity, decisive point, and termination criteria. Every one of those terms points forward, not backward.

A center of gravity is not a fact about an adversary’s past. Change his objective, and his center of gravity moves with it, even though nothing in his history shifts an inch. An end state is not caused by anything; it is posited and theorized, and the plan is the reasoning backward from it. The entire apparatus of operational design is a machine for working from an imagined future condition back to what we do this week.

Mission command pushes further. Disciplined initiative makes no sense unless human beings are goal-driven. If behavior were truly the product of prior conditioning, the right response to uncertainty would be more conditioning: tighter control measures, more specific orders, and more rehearsals. Mission command says the opposite. It bets that a subordinate who understands the purpose will produce competent action in circumstances nobody anticipated, rather than one who has been more thoroughly trained. The Army has staked its command philosophy on a claim about human motivation, and most of us have never examined that claim. Doctrine gives us nouns. What it does not give us is an account of human action that tells a field-grade officer what to do with those nouns at 0300, when the estimate is due at 0600, and the enemy has just done something that does not fit. Under that pressure, we fall back on whatever habit of explanation we absorbed most deeply. For most officers, that habit is the biography we created.

1950, Korea

The clearest example is old enough that no one needs to defend a current position to examine it honestly. In autumn 1950, as United Nations forces advanced north toward the Yalu, people actively debated the possibility of Chinese intervention. Theater intelligence judged it unlikely. That assessment rested largely on biographical reasoning: China was exhausted by civil war, its forces were technologically outmatched, its economy lay in ruins, and its recent history offered little reason to think a country in such a condition would challenge the United States. Warnings did exist. For instance, Zhou Enlai sent one through the Indian ambassador in Beijing. However, it was dismissed as a bluff, partly because it did not fit the picture of what a country in China’s condition would rationally do.

Ask the other question, and the analysis reverses. What was Beijing trying to bring about? A buffer on its northeastern frontier and a guarantor of the revolution in Asia. Now work backward. If that was the objective, what had to be true? Forces had to mass in Manchuria. Crossings had to be reconnoitered. Political signaling had to establish a threshold that would justify intervention when it came. Every one of those preconditions was observable, and several were observed. They were filed as ambiguous because the framework had already concluded that the actor was not the kind of actor who would do this. That is the failure mode in miniature. The biography told us what China was. It could not tell us what China wanted. What China wanted determined what China did.

Where the habit began

The habit emerged from psychoanalysis and entered the military by the back door. In 1942, the British Army revamped officer selection using methods developed by the Tavistock group. Wilfred Bion served as the board psychiatrist, while Eric Trist was its psychologist. Instead of a single interview, candidates spent three days under observation. Bion assessed candidates by observing how they managed the tensions that arise in working groups. He saw leadership potential in the ability to manage group dynamics, rather than in traits measured in isolation. This work, along with the Northfield experiments in military psychiatry, laid the foundation for modern group theory. The methods proved successful enough that British industry and the civil service later adopted them.

This tradition earned its place, and the article is not trying to make anyone sneer at it. Under wartime pressure, it solved a real problem better than anything that had come before. However, understanding what it was designed to do helps us understand our own leaders: how to select them, help them improve, and bind them into units. It was never intended to help us understand the enemy. However, explanatory habits migrate. Once an institution learns to explain a man by reconstructing what shaped him, that becomes the default way to explain anyone, including the guy on the other side of the line. Nobody decided this; it simply spread and has remained beneath our intelligence estimates ever since.

The other branch of psychology

Alfred Adler broke with Freud in 1911 over this very question. Freud explained behavior in terms of what came before it. Adler argued that behavior is organized around a goal a person sets for himself; the goal, not the history, is the unit of explanation. A man is not pushed by his past. He is pulled by his imagined future, which reaches back into his past for whatever justifies that movement. Applied to an adversary state, this is no philosophical nicety. It changes three things in intelligence estimates.

First, anomalies become information, not embarrassments. When an adversary departs from his established pattern, the biography method treats the deviation as noise to explain away. The goal method treats it as a signal that either his objective has changed or his assessment of what it takes to achieve it has changed. Either way, you have learned something you needed to know.

Second, “irrational” is no longer an acceptable conclusion. It acknowledges that we have yet to recover the premises that make his actions sensible to him. Adler called this private logic: the set of beliefs, invisible to the actor and often absurd from the outside, that makes his behavior perfectly reasonable given those beliefs. Recovering them is neither sympathy nor excuse-making. It is the only red teaming that yields a testable prediction: once you state what he would have to believe, you can observe whether he continues to act as though he believes it.

Third, grievance follows the goal; it does not precede it. An adversary state does not act because of historical grievance. It draws from an infinite supply of grievances, selecting those that justify the action its current objective requires. Analysts who mistake grievance for the cause will be surprised whenever the objective shifts and an entirely different set of historical wounds suddenly becomes urgent.

How it affects the estimate

The practical translation is to reverse the sequence, which fits within the process we already use. Instead of establishing a pattern of life and projecting it forward, the staff posits two or three competing adversary end states and treats each as a hypothesis. For each hypothesis, it asks what would need to be true for that end state to be achievable: what forces, positioning, logistics, political groundwork, and timing would be required. These necessary preconditions become the information requirements. They are specific, observable, and, critically, discriminating: a precondition that appears in every hypothesis tells us nothing. The requirements worth collecting are those that distinguish one hypothesis from another.

This method does not discard history; it reclassifies it. Rather than showing what the adversary is determined to do, it shows which goals he has found attractive in the past and what he has been willing to pay to achieve them. That is genuinely useful, but it is a different claim from the one the biography makes. The discipline this demands is commitment. A hypothesis that yields no discriminating preconditions is not a hypothesis; it is a temperament. I have sat through more than one wargame where the enemy’s course of action was essentially a vibe, defended by appeals to national character. That never survives the question: what would we expect to see this week if it were true?

Compensation: why the loudest claim gives it away

Another element of Adlerian theory is directly relevant, yet I have never seen it taught in professional military education. Adler held that human striving begins with a felt sense of deficiency and moves toward a felt sense of adequacy. When that deficiency becomes acute, however, this movement overshoots into what he called overcompensation. In his account, the superiority complex does not stem from actual superiority; it grows out of the inferiority complex. It is a performance staged to conceal a gap the actor feels but refuses to name.

Scale that up to the state level, and the result is a targeting insight, not a psychiatric one. Compensatory behavior centers on the specific domain where a deficit is felt and persists beyond what the material ledger can justify, because it responds to the perceived gap rather than the balance sheet. The loudest, most repetitive claims of strength are therefore the clearest indicators of perceived weakness, revealing where an adversary believes he is behind. When a state repeatedly insists that a particular capability is impenetrable, it reveals something about that capability, usually not what it intends to convey.

This gives escalation a clearer logic than the usual language of prestige and face. It suggests that concessions in the wrong domain will not de-escalate the situation because they fail to address the perceived loss. It also suggests that humiliation is not merely a side effect of coercion but a driver of continued action. Finally, it warns that an adversary may keep investing in a compensatory effort long after we judge it irrational, so we should not assume he is about to quit.

It works the other way, too.

Two Adlerian ideas apply to our own formations, not the enemy. The first is social interest: a sense of contributing to a shared task. In the Freudian model, cohesion centers on the commander: the unit stays together because of what the leader means to his soldiers. This model predicts what it describes: cohesion weakens when the leader is gone. A unit built instead on each soldier’s sense of contribution to the mission should hold together better when the commander is dead, the radio is out, and no one is coming. We say we expect to fight that way. It is worth asking which model of cohesion we are actually building, since different leader behaviors produce each one, and they fail in different ways.

The second is the separation of tasks: deciding whose decision something is, then leaving it alone. This is mission command framed as a psychological skill rather than a doctrinal exhortation. For forty years, we have told leaders not to micromanage, but it has not worked, partly because we never gave them a way to understand why they cannot stop. Adler’s answer is uncomfortable and probably right: taking over a subordinate’s task relieves a senior’s anxiety immediately, which is why the behavior persists even when everyone agrees it is wrong. Another slide about trust will not fix micromanagement. Officers need to learn to recognize, in the moment, that the task they just took on was not theirs, and that they took it on because it was about them.

What I am not arguing

I am not arguing that Freud was wrong or Adler was right. Psychodynamic theory’s empirical standing remains contested in psychology, and serious researchers have defended much of it against the confident dismissals of a generation ago. My claim is narrower: the explanatory habit we inherited (understanding a man by reconstructing what shaped him) is a poor fit for a planning process in which every construct points forward.

I am not arguing that we should treat adversaries the way Adler advised teachers to treat students, either. Adlerian literature offers many prescriptions for encouragement, democratic process, and avoiding manipulation. Those apply to people whose development you are responsible for, not to an enemy you intend to defeat. Use the interpretive half on him and the developmental half on your own people. Do not let the two overlap.

Furthermore, Adler is no magic key. Organizational research building on his work is thinner than its advocates admit: it is mostly conceptual, draws on small studies, and lacks the evidence to promise results. What he offers is not proof but a better-fitting way to frame the question: not what happened to the enemy or what made him this way, but where he is trying to go and what the world must look like for him to get there. Those preconditions are our collection plan. The enemy biography never was.

References

The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections From His Writings, edited by H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Basic Books, 1956).

South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (June-November 1950), by R. E. Appleman (Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1961).

Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, by W. R. Bion (Tavistock, 1961).

Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, by E. A. Cohen and J. Gooch (Free Press, 1990).

“Individual Psychology and Organizational Effectiveness,” by E. D. Ferguson (Journal of Individual Psychology, Vol. 55, No. 1, 1999).

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, by Sigmund Freud, translated by J. Strachey (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, Hogarth Press, 1955; originally published 1921).

Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments: Advancing on a Different Front, by T. Harrison (Jessica Kingsley, 2000).

“The Northfield Experiments,” by T. Harrison and D. Clarke (British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 160, 1992).

Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, by Headquarters, Department of the Army (ADP 6-0, 2019).

Planning and Orders Production, by Headquarters, Department of the Army (FM 5-0, 2022).

Joint Planning, by Joint Chiefs of Staff (Joint Publication 5-0, 2020).

The Courage to Be Disliked, by I. Kishimi and F. Koga (Atria Books, 2018; originally published 2013).

A Primer of Adlerian Psychology: The Analytic-Behavioral-Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler, by H. H. Mosak and M. Maniacci (Brunner/Mazel, 1999).

“Edward Glover, John Bowlby, Psychiatry, Bion, and the War Office Selection Boards,” by C. Vickers (Group Analysis, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2023).

“The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science,” by D. Westen (Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 3, 1998).

China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War, by A. S. Whiting (Macmillan, 1960).

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Juan Pablo Vivaldi Remy is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army with more than 27 years of commissioned service, including assignments across NATO, EUCOM, INDOPACOM, and SOUTHCOM, and most recently with NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine. He holds a Ph.D. in Advanced Educational Studies and an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Management, has taught at West Point, and serves on the faculty at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, the U.S. government, or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.