Leverage the Cognitive Domain of War

25 Sep 2012

Leverage the Cognitive Domain of War When he served as director, force transformation in the office of the secretary of defense, RADM Art Cebrowski asserted that wars are w...

Leverage the Cognitive Domain of War

When he served as director, force transformation in the office of the secretary of defense, RADM Art Cebrowski asserted that wars are won or lost in the cognitive, rather than in the physical, domain.22 By this he meant that the information revolution has ushered in a new era in which mastery of the physical domain of war is no longer sufficient. His thinking on this is most applicable to the problem of deterrence in the twenty-first century, where we must develop military campaigns to deter the use of nuclear weapons by a variety of potential adversaries.

Kahneman’s behavioral science approach to economics is built on Herbert Simon’s pioneering work on prospect theory of choice making, describing how decisions are made among alternatives with uncertain risks. Kahneman extended prospect theory to examine more closely the biases and heuristics in human decision making.23 The prospect theory school of decision making asserts that, although such skewed thinking was generally successful, or at least good enough for economic satisfaction if not maximization of utility, nevertheless the impact of such bias could be minimized to approach the ideal, rational decision-making model.

In the 1990s an alternative behavioral school emerged in contrast to Kahneman’s adaptation of prospect theory, suggesting that such heuristic decisions are after all quite natural and, in terms of efficiency in doing the things necessary for human progress—namely survival, evolution, and domination by the species—often even better than optimizing strategies. What Kahneman found to be bias, deflecting the human mind from the ideal, researchers such as Gary Klein and Gerd Gigerenzer viewed as adaptive, emergent behavior. Their field research suggests that humans, perhaps regardless of culture, make decisions based on a few common heuristics that enable decision making that is fast enough to avoid falling prey to other species and sufficiently frugal in terms of exploiting the cognitive capacity of the human brain to seek and absorb only enough information necessary to make the decisions at hand.

Klein conducted over 600 field studies of experienced, successful decision makers who were confronted with situations involving incomplete infor­mation, uncertainty, high risk, and intense time pressures (e.g., fire fighters, tactical and operational military staffs, medical professionals, nuclear power plant operators, etc.). He concludes, “The evidence that supposedly shows that stress results in decision errors is not convincing . . . experienced decision makers adapt to time pressures very well by focusing on the most relevant cues and ignoring others.” Klein argues there are some common sources of error that might be useful for campaign planners to understand and train to minimize. For example, de minimus sorting occurs when people in the decision-making chain are aware of disconfirming evidence and may even seek it out but then explain it away; Klein and his research team dissected the USS Vincennes’ shoot-down of the Iranian airliner in 1988 and concluded that this was the root cause of that error.

Confirmation bias occurs when a person chooses to seek confirming evidence that has little diagnostic value because it cannot help distinguish between alternative hypotheses and does not try to obtain other diagnostic evidence that might disconfirm the favored hypothesis. He cites the example of the 1973 shoot-down of an off-course Libyan civilian airliner by the Israelis as a case of this type of error.

Klein posits that training on countermeasures to such errors would prove useful to campaign planning staffs. One such technique he calls pre-mortem mental simulation—a technique especially useful for planners who are often overconfident about the plan they created. This technique asks planners to imagine their plan was executed and failed. The pre-mortem helps reveal hidden or understated risks.

Gigerenzer has focused on laboratory and field research aimed at under­standing the elements of the cognitive domain. He suggests that all human decision making boils down to three components that form a heuristic: search rules used to limit the volume of data considered, stopping rules to limit the amount of time and effort spent on collecting data, and decision rules to apply in making choices among alternatives.

Humans and animals make inferences about their world with limited time, knowledge, and computational power. In contrast, many models of rational inference view the mind as if it were a supernatural being possessing demonic powers of reason, boundless knowledge, and all of eternity with which to make decisions . . . we pro­pose replacing the image of an omniscient mind computing intricate probabilities and utilities with that of a bounded mind reaching into an adaptive toolbox filled with fast and frugal heuristics.

If this is so, then military decision making across cultures and across the ages may be reducible to a shared set of common fast and frugal heuristics. If we could determine what some common military decision-making heuristics are, then maybe we could better anticipate an opponent’s decision as it is made, perhaps even in advance.

Do Not Assume Opponents without Fear Cannot Be Deterred

Too many military planners assert that defiant proliferators and terrorists are irrational and cannot be deterred, so the only option is that they be killed or captured. There is no empirical analysis to support that argument. There is indeed evidence that rogues and nonstate actors who possess weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery can be deterred.

Deterrence worked in 1991. The United States conveyed the not-so-veiled threat that if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons on US troops, then we would respond with nuclear weapons. Although Tariq Aziz said later that he did not take President Bush’s letter to Saddam, we now know that the message was indeed conveyed and that Iraqi generals took it seriously.26 Indeed, there is emerging evidence that Saddam himself was convinced that the United States would use nuclear weapons on Iraq if he were to order or authorize use of chemical weapons on American troops in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Rather than assuming terrorists cannot be deterred, we should conduct the necessary behavioral research to determine just where their fears lie, then apply the threat of military power to create the desired effects on their behavior. Since 9/11 Dr. Jerrold Post, a long-time consultant to the CIA, has studied all major terrorist groups and is one of only a few who has interviewed hundreds of detainees from the war on terror. Dr. Post reports on his interviews,

[T]wo responses from the terrorists deserve emphasis . . . one concerned the fear of these weapons, of “the silent death,” of infectious microbes, deadly toxins and radioactivity. Not everyone wishes to be a martyr, and the danger of handling these deadly chemical, biological, and radiological materials should be emphasized. The second theme was the proscription in the Koran against mass casualties, includ­ing killing innocents, and the requirement to not poison the earth and living things.

We need to identify such fears and how nuclear weapons can threaten in ways that speak to those fears.

Develop Innovative Tactical and Operational Forms

Finally, lacking a playbook, we need to develop ways to apply deter­rence in this multipolar, proliferated nuclear world. In my own experience across a number of war games and exercises, it is clear that the process of developing deterrence courses of action has become a lost art. Few players or staffs have a sense of the range of capabilities available for deterrence operations, and fewer still have a nuanced understanding of what might deter the particular adversary. In such events, most participants arrive with the deterrence belief that “one size fits all” situations but then quickly come to realize that nuclear deterrence is not a pickup game.

A number of analysts have suggested we need more accurate nuclear weapons with low-yield options to make deterrence credible at the opera­tional level. They argue this would be the case for both regional adversaries and peers. They believe it would work by enabling US forces to hold sanctuaries at risk while minimizing collateral damage to levels even lower than those that would occur if conventional weapons were used. If this approach were adopted, it would require that joint force campaign planners experience a rebirth of expertise in nuclear operations.

New forms of deterrence operations can be developed for this multipolar, proliferated era in which deterrence has grown increasingly complex. We must resurrect joint doctrine for nuclear operations and revise Air Force nuclear operations doctrine. Additionally, the art of military campaign planning must incorporate techniques and procedures for deterrence operations, including deterrence lines of operations that provide deter­rence branches and sequels extending across all phases of the joint force campaign. We must involve expert, live, red teams that will produce insight into opponent military decision-making processes while fielding a new generation of analytic tools for planning staffs to measure and assess the credibility of their deterrence planning efforts.

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