I'd have put those in four explicit boxes as clearer. The enemy, upper right box. The public, lower right box. The government, lower left box. Coalition military, upper left box. The whole left side represents the government alliance and its directly controlled agents, aka "the authorities". While the whole lower row presents "civilians", government or populace, as distinct from the "combatants", upper row.
The key "5 box row" between the upper right enemy and the populace section of the chart, is meant to track the portions of the population strongly aligned with the terrorists or the government or on the fence, with intermediate boxes for "leaners" or supporters not fully committed or radicalized. That is basically how to keep score - while it is possible to win by just smashing every bit of the upper right dependencies, the likely way to win is to drive public support for the terrorist-insurgents to zero and for the government to 20% committed and 60% leaners or some such.
Do you need all the other nodes and arcs? Well they are trying to map out how effort focused on specific strength-building or nation-building areas may or may not impact the main question. And some of them are clearly issues worth identifying, even if they could be presented in a more organized fashion - like the issue of sanctuaries abroad in the upper right, along with narcotics funding. Or the issues of money flow from coalition to government, or US domestic support for the war, on the left hand side.
It seems to me people here are overreacting to visual "busy-ness" while not being remotely interested in actually diving in to the problem and trying to understand the actual factors driving the war. It is perfectly normal for a field grade officer to only be concerned with his little bit of this problem, and either to think his own efforts are the only "front" that matters, or on the contrary not to see how what he's doing helps or matters at all. It would clearly be useful for anyone that describes to see all the other pieces of the problem and where his own efforts fit.
Which is probably how someone actually constructed this chart - surveying areas men were working on and asking them what their key concerns or goals were, and then linking the ones named by more than one group.
Can it be organized further? Undoubtedly. But pretending that you can just decide from the top down that the war is only about these two things and they are all that matter so its simple, is a recipe for stupidity, not clarity.
I would have used Vizio and standard systems engineering notation. But then, that chart is for reference not for
lecturing from. No eye chart can be effective as a lecture aid.
I understand what this is trying to do-and it does it well. On building a planning doctrine/situational awareness level it is great.
The senior officers usually usually leave the details to the underlings and only want the big chunks.
You’re right-sometimes a recipe for problems