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Introduction
Napoleon Bonaparte once stated, "If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering on an undertaking, I have meditated for long and foreseen what may occur." While seemingly visionary in his time, this battlefield wizardry known in today's Army as intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) was practiced by successful leaders before Napoleon and continues to remain an integral planning aspect of warfare to this day. While IPB was not codified in a French field manual in Napoleon's day, this planning tool has proven to withstand the test of time over three centuries of military revolutionary warfare and across the spectrum of conflict.
Leaders over time have relied on IPB to defeat the enemy by visualizing the opponent based upon his capabilities and resources in conjunction with the battlefield terrain, weather, demographics, and other factors. IPB has remained a significant and constant aspect of operational warfare since the 1700s because this planning and visualization process has proven to be highly effective for leaders at all levels who embrace the process to defeat the enemy. It has proven to be adaptable in the face of military revolutions and it is flexible enough to be utilized across the spectrum of conflict.
In today's U.S. Army, IPB is defined as a "systematic process of analyzing and visualizing the portions of the mission variables of threat, terrain, weather, and civil considerations in a specific area of interest and for a specific mission. By applying IPB, commanders gain the information necessary to selectively apply and maximize the operational effectiveness at critical points in time and space."1 IPB is an essential component to the staff-planning process because the endstate of the process allows the commander to minimize chance in a mission by visualizing the battle, war game likely decision points, and synchronize and coordinate decisive actions by his units in the time and place of his choosing.
The four steps of IPB, which are continuously performed or assessed and refined, include:
1. Define the operational environment in order to identify the characteristics of the environment that influence friendly and threat operations.
2. Describe environmental effects on operations, to include the evaluation of all aspects of the battlefield such as terrain, weather, infrastructure, and demographics.
3. Evaluate the threat by...