are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we
have to take steps to protect that frugality.
This is precisely what Van Riper understood with Red Team.
He and his staff did their analysis. But they did it first, before
the battle started. Once hostilities began, Van Riper was careful
not to overload his team with irrelevant information. Meetings
were brief. Communication between headquarters and the
commanders in the field was limited. He wanted to create an
environment where rapid cognition was possible. Blue Team,
meanwhile, was gorging on information. They had a database,
they boasted, with forty thousand separate entries in it. In front
of them was the CROP — a huge screen showing the field of
combat in real time. Experts from every conceivable corner of
the U.S. government were at their service. They were
seamlessly connected to the commanders of the four military
services in a state-of-the-art interface. They were the
beneficiaries of a rigorous ongoing series of analyses about
what their opponent’s next moves might be.
But once the shooting started, all of that information became
a burden. “I can understand how all the concepts that Blue was
using translate into planning for an engagement,” Van Riper
says. “But does it make a difference in the moment? I don’t