DIA Unveils Framework to Gauge Foreign Military's Will to Fight

"Will to Fight is one of the most challenging elements of military capability analysis because of its fundamentally intangible nature," the Defense Intelligence Agency's new document says.

DIA's 'Will to Fight' framework: what it is and why it was published

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released an unclassified framework it says is intended to "support intelligence community analysis" and to help the public "achieve a deeper understanding of key challenges and functional threats to U.S. national security." The framework, last updated in September 2024, seeks to make a professional, reproducible tradecraft for assessing a combatant's willingness to fight — an element the agency describes as far less tangible than numbers of tanks or the condition of aircraft.

Analytic dimensions: from authority and integrity to esprit de corps

The framework directs analysts to assess dynamics "at all levels of power" — explicitly citing factors that range from the "authority" and "integrity" of national leadership to the "Esprit de corps" among individual soldiers. It also requires judgment about the "Stakes of the Conflict," asking whether victory or defeat amounts to an "existential condition for combatant[s] e.g. an existential threat to the state, organization, or regime[.]"

The document cautions analysts that the answers are not static: "[The] will to fight can change quickly, dramatically, and many times over the course of a conflict for each party to the conflict," it says, and adds that a change in status does not inherently mean a prior baseline was wrong. Analysts are instructed to "seek to establish causality between events or criteria that have the ability to affect will to fight."

Two formative cases: Afghanistan 2021 and Ukraine 2022

The framework's release is explicitly linked to two contrasting episodes the agency says exposed gaps in earlier analytic practice. The DIA spokesperson noted the timing in the context of the fifth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed on Aug. 30, 2021 — an exit that coincided with rapid Afghan force collapse and the flight of then-President Ashraf Ghani from Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021.

By contrast, the agency's then-head, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, said in November 2024 that the U.S. Intelligence Community misestimated the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. At an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event, Kruse said Ukrainian forces "exhibited a will to fight that was far beyond anything any of us had estimated," and suggested that DIA had miscalculated some predictive factors, especially how hard Ukrainians would fight to defend their land. Kruse described the new "'will to fight' all-source tradecraft methodology" as an attempt to answer "What does that look like? How do we assess what that looks like?"

How the framework will be used — and where DIA has already applied it

In its public materials, the DIA positions will to fight as one of multiple "intangibles" in a broader military capabilities picture that also includes training, troop demographics, defense budgets and doctrine. The agency argues that better professional analysis of will to fight can "enable us to meaningfully drive collection" — in other words, to shape what intelligence collectors focus on to improve understanding of what matters most across conflicts and timelines.

Kruse said the framework had been used to assess the U.S.'s top strategic priority, China. A DIA spokesperson declined to disclose what other militaries had been evaluated or what conclusions the agency had drawn.

What this means for DIA analysts, policymakers, and the public

• DIA analysts: The framework provides a structured checklist and a common vocabulary — from leadership "authority" and "integrity" to unit-level "esprit de corps" — intended to reduce surprises by guiding collection and establishing causal links between events and changes in will to fight.
• Policymakers and the Intelligence Community: The document is designed as an "all-source tradecraft methodology" to inform community-wide analysis and decision-making, particularly when stakes or trajectories of conflict shift rapidly.
• The public and external audiences: As part of DIA's "ongoing series of unclassified, foundational overviews," the framework is meant to give nonclassified audiences more clarity about how the agency approaches one of the harder pieces of military analysis.

The framework is an effort to turn judgment into a reproducible product without pretending the intangible can be easily reduced to a number. Its authors acknowledge that will to fight is dynamic and observable only through a mosaic of signals — leadership behavior, perceived allied support, soldier morale and the existential stakes of combat among them. Whether the methodology prevents future surprise will hinge not only on the checklist itself, but on whether collection priorities and analytic practice change to match it.

https://breakingdefense.com/2026/09/exclusive-how-the-dia-measures-a-militarys-will-to-fight/