Decision Analysis

Surviving First Contact In the nineteenth century, the great Prussian strategist Helmuth Von Moltke penned his famous quote "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Moltke is dead--and it is time for his quote to go with him. Modern military plans are constructed using a framework as a foundation that is known as the operational design. While the concept of the operational design has evolved over the last decade, joint planning doctrine has lagged miserably behind. Dr. Keith Dickson made a significant contribution to the development of a practical methodology for crafting the operational design in his article Operational Design: A Methodology for Planners. However, his methodology is incomplete. To create a flexible operational design and a plan that works from planning through execution in an adaptive environment, decision analysis must be added to the process and this process should be codified in joint doctrine.Current joint planning doctrine provides abstract theory about operational design, but offers very little that is of practical use to a planner. It presents even less about campaign decision-making. The key decisions a commander makes in a plan will determine whether the campaign succeeds or fails. Modern planning tools must include a process to support those decisions.Dr. William Duggan's monograph Coup d' Oeil: Strategic Intuition in Army Planning uses recent scientific studies on how the brain makes decisions to assert that military commanders use a decision-making process that fuses intuition and analysis despite the solely analytical process written in doctrine. Modern planners recognize the need for this intuition in the complex adaptive environment faced today.