Publications

This essay examines the prevalent theoretical approaches to decision making and surveys practical models appropriate to the military setting. It discusses and compares the relative advantages and disadvantages of each model, and then makes recommendations about their application to the military decision making process. Currently, two major approaches, the rational and the cognitive, offer an orderly process that may help military leaders make better decisions. Neither is yet complete. Each approach offers its own set of concepts to attain the chief products of the decision making process. These sets of concepts blur the real differences between the approaches and draw one into a debate that does not deal with essence. In addition, both approaches tend at times to take the tools and the ideas and over-develop them into hobbling, constraining techniques, thereby missing the fruits that could have been reaped by a more informed, tempered use of them as ideas. Thus finding a bridge between the approaches that recognizes the advantages and disadvantages of each and makes a temperate, judicious use of the respective tools can allow us to enjoy the best of both worlds.