Content area
Full Text
AKEY Objective Force premise is to achieve a significant increase in operating tempo (OPTEMPO). Fundamental to increased OPTEMPO is gathering, integrating, and applying information that helps military planners anticipate and counter threats before an adversary can act. To act faster than the enemy can, the Army currently uses a procedural and cumbersome military decisionmaking process (MDMP) that military planners often abbreviate.1 However, little guidance exists on how to abbreviate the process. U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 101-5, Staff Organization and Operations, gives suggestions, but no real guidance.2 To take full advantage of the Objective Force's new capabilities, the Army needs a strong, fast, flexible decisionmaking process.
In 1989, Gary A. Klein, Roberta Calderwood, and Anne Clinton-Cirocco presented what they called the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model, which describes how decisionmakers can recognize a plausible course of action (COA) as the first one to consider.3 A commander's knowledge, training, and experience generally help in correctly assessing a situation and developing and mentally wargaming a plausible COA, rather than taking time to deliberately and methodically contrast it with alternatives using a common set of abstract evaluation dimensions.4
Klein, S. Wolf, Laura G Militellio, and Carolyn E. Zsambok show that skilled decisionmakers usually generate a good COA on their first try.5 J.G Johnson and M. Raab replicated this finding, extending it to show that when skilled decisionmakers abandon their initial COA in favor of a later one, the subsequent CO A's quality is significantly lower than the first one.6 Johnston, J.E. Driskell, and E. Salas show that intuitive decision processes result in higher performance than do analytical processes.7 The findings call into question the rationale behind MDMP, which assumes that good decisionmaking requires generating and evaluating three possible COAs to find the best solution.
John F. Schmitt and Klein developed the Recognition Planning Model (RPM) from research on the RPD model and on several studies of military planning exercises to codify the informal and intuitive planning strategies skilled Army and U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) planning teams used.8
The RPM has stimulated interest in the military ever since Schmitt and Klein described it. Individual Army and USMC battalion commanders have experimented with the RPM and found it useful. The British military has been conducting experiments with the RPM, demonstrating its...