United States Military Academy Class of 2006 War Studies Conference Reassessing Deterrence in the 21st Century Tomorrow’s potential adversaries require a new approach for American strategic deterrence. Fifty years...
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MWI Non-Resident Fellow ML Cavanaugh argues that Strategic Landpower as a policy initiative is dead, but as a vital concept for military forces must live on.
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We have many choices if we want to define and think about military innovation. Major Dan Maurer proposes that we can think of it better by thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Guest MWI contributor Dr. Frank Hoffman argues the levels of conflict are increasing and that a more contested era of geopolitics is gathering.
Read MoreThe US Marine Corps’ doctrinal conceptualization of warfare (HQMC, 1997) is inherently psychological and therefore understanding the human cognitive, psychological, and physical limits with respect to combat are essential and identifying these limits should be the sine quo non of military psychology[1]. Combatants must confront chance, uncertainty, friction (Mattis, 2008), volatility (Laurence, 2011), and urgency (Zaccarro et al, 1995) while contending with existential threats. Combat is a fundamentally uncertain form of competition (Boyd, 1976) where consequential decisions are often based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information (HQMC, 1997), and thus decision-making is the principal human factor in warfare (Krulak, 1999). Boyd’s Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action (OODA) Loop (or Boyd Cycle) is not an answer to the question at hand, but it provides a means of investigating human cognitive, psychological, and physical limits as they relate to tactical decision-making. Bryant (2006) and Benson & Rotkoff (2011) were correct that Boyd’s model was not the result of psychological theory; however, the OODA Loop can be synthesized with the neural process model of automatic multi-structure controlled social cognition, the X and C systems, (Lieberman et al., 2003) as well as Baddeley’s (2003) working memory model to provide a neuroanatomical and cognitive reference point to the original. The combination of the model and those reference points provides us with an appropriate framework through which to describe and address the question at hand.
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