Search Results for: multi domain

Essay Campaign #14: Tactical Decision-Making, Military Psychology, and the Boyd Cycle

Summer Essay Campaign #14: “Tactical Decision-Making – A Military Psychology Perspective on the Boyd Cycle”

To Answer Question #3: “Where are the human cognitive, psychological, physical limits with respect to combat?”

By Major Jason Spitaletta, USMCR

The 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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Essay Campaign #9: Cultural Impediments to Negotiating Complex Challenges

Summer Essay Campaign #9: “Cultural Impediments to Negotiating Complex Challenges”

To Answer Question #7: “In what ways does strategic culture influence military operations?”

By Richard Maltz

Our efforts to negotiate complex challenges, to include the ability to establish and exercise a significant capability to operate, compete, and prevail in the Cognitive Domain, are principally constrained, as is everything else that we think, say, and do, by our own culture of productivity (human interaction with the goal of accomplishing shared objectives).  This constraint will be manifested in several ways, at multiple levels.  Salient among these are:

1.  Inertia.  In actively and consciously engaging complex challenges (notably campaigning in the Cognitive Domain), we are challenging our existing habits.  We are habituated to focus on the Physical and Information Domains.  We have staffed our ranks, built our organizations, structured our processes, and refined our culture to focus on these, and to largely ignore the complex, especially in the Cognitive Domain.  Reversing that approach will require defeating tremendous organizational inertia, and transformation of our manning, organizations, processes, and culture.  An undertaking on this scale will be daunting, and will be viewed my many (likely most) as more difficult than it’s worth.  The alternative however is to continue to institutionalize the tremendous waste and opportunity costs imbedded in and emblematic of our existing culture.

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