Decision making cycle of Great Captains
An outstanding discussion all around and well worth further debate.
All great commanders are expert problem solvers. The military genius does so under great risk, uncertainty and time-pressure and may not develop the 'perfect' solution, but will produce the 'best' for that situation.
I have read a great deal about J.Boyd's OODA loop and Recognition Primed decision making (G. Klein) yet have not been able to find a definitive explanation or model for a commander's decision making cycle - other than what I have pieced together myself.
Does anyone have any guidance in this area?
Thanks
Commander's imperatives (J. Keegan)
Slapout9 thanks for the OODA/Decision Cycle and further reading
John Keegan's Mask of Command (315-38) that a commander is a man of his society and acts accordingly - therefore I am wondering how the decision making cycle of different commanders would be influenced by the following 'imperatives' that Keegan describes:
1. Kinship - the creation of a bond between a commander and men.
2. Prescriptions - the need for a commander to speak directly to his men.
3. Sanctions - the issuing of rewards and punishments.
4. Action - intelligence gathering and the formulation of plans.
5. Example - the most important imperative, the need for a commander to be seen to share dangers with his men.
Surely, each nation/time period would have a different emphasis on each one of the above. This being the case would the OODA cycle be influenced by these factors?
This is where Sun Tzu comes in...."if you know yourself and your enemy..."
(not just dribble....diligently trying to create a composite/template of a commander's decision making cycle)
Influence of American Civil War in Europe
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Fuchs
I've always been astonished by the focus of Americans on their Civil War whenever the topic moves to military history. Even really smart Americans seem to treat that one few-year civil war as a kind of inexhaustible reservoir for military history insights. I've yet to meet a British, French or Russian who's comparably fixated on the Crimean War, for example.
For a discussion of the influence of the American Civil War on European military officers I recommend the book The Military Legacy of the American Civil War: The European Inheritance, 1959 and reprinted in 1988, by the late Jay Luvaas. The career of Dr. Luvaas included being an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy and a professor at the U.S. Army War College. His book contains a chapter on German observations and analyses of the the war. The author concedes that the war had a negligible impact on German military thinking because of the preoccupation of Bismarck and the German states on unification during the 1860s. However, British army officers studied the campaigns of "Stonewall" Jackson at staff college during the first half of the last century.
Colonel G.F.R. Henderson (1854-1903), a York and Lancaster veteran of Tel el-Kebir, wrote the book The Fredericksburg Campaign in 1886, which brought him to the attention of then-General Garnet Wolseley and led to his appointment as an instructor at Sandhurst in 1890. In 1898 he published Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, the book for which he is best known. Henderson was appointed chief of intelligence in South Africa in 1900 but he caught malaria and was invalided home, where he died in 1903. Regular British officers serving in the First and Second World Wars would have studied Lee and Jackson's campaigns at staff college, which became part of the curriculum when Colonel Henderson was a staff college instructor.