Decision navigation: coping with 21st-century challenges in tactical decisionmaking

Military Review, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Dennis T. Gyllensporre

Coping with these challenges puts a premium on decentralization and adaptive organizations, implying a need for maneuver warfare and the learning organization. Maneuver warfare and the learning organization are quite possibly already integral parts of a modern army, but there are no absolute definitions of these concepts. Their key characteristics need to be emphasized further, and this does not necessarily imply a need for only minor changes. The change in the underlying paradigm suggests a need for a transformation.

In narrowing the post-Newtonian paradigm, Sir Karl Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of science, provides a way forward. He did not believe in holism and Newton's grand design. (33) His theory for problem solving was piecemeal engineering based on

P1 [] TS [] EE [] P2,

where P1 is the initial problem, TS the trial solution proposed, EE the process of error elimination applied to the trial solution, and P2 the resulting situation. (34) Rather than finding the optimal solution, Popper's theory calls for a continuous, iterative, reassess-readjust approach to finding an acceptable solution.

In a comprehensive National Defense University study of command arrangements, the U.S. Army's command philosophy was found to be in the middle of the continuum from mission-specific to order-specific command philosophies. (35) The study concluded that a shift to a mission-specific command philosophy reduced the requirement of greater detail in and more frequent updates to the information necessary for decisionmaking. But this requires more proficient subordinates who possess a high degree of initiative.

Maneuver warfare stands out even more than before as the way ahead. Information Age technologies support centralized decisionmaking, but decentralized maneuver warfare "has its source at the deepest level of the Third Wave: post-Newtonian science." (36) In maneuver warfare, decisions are distributed, implying the distribution of complexity and uncertainty and fewer decisions facilitating tempo.

Identified challenges put a premium on adaptation. Learning organizations learn and respond to changes rapidly. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge identifies five disciplines of a learning organization: personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. (37) Systems thinking demonstrates that every decision has effects in other parts of the organization, often in an unintended way. (38) In other words, we must recognize complexity.

Systems thinking also implies that limited understanding of how an organization works and limited understanding of the adversary's responses make detailed long-range plans of limited value. A successful leader in a learning organization evokes initiative from his subordinates and uses all of the intellectual horsepower that the organization can give him.

Decisionmaking in Transformation

At the tactical level, leaders and soldiers act incrementally, allowing for feedback and gradual adjustments. Leaders should undertake decisionmaking