changed.” It wasn’t that Van Riper hated all rational analysis.
It’s that he thought it was inappropriate in the midst of battle,
where the uncertainties of war and the pressures of time made
it impossible to compare options carefully and calmly.
In the early 1990s, when Van Riper was head of the Marine
Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, he became friendly with
a man named Gary Klein. Klein ran a consulting firm in Ohio
and wrote a book called Sources of Power, which is one of the
classic works on decision making. Klein studied nurses,
intensive care units, firefighters, and other people who make
decisions under pressure, and one of his conclusions is that
when experts make decisions, they don’t logically and
systematically compare all available options. That is the way
people are taught to make decisions, but in real life it is much
too slow. Klein’s nurses and firefighters would size up a
situation almost immediately and act, drawing on experience
and intuition and a kind of rough mental simulation. To Van
Riper, that seemed to describe much more accurately how
people make decisions on the battlefield.
Once, out of curiosity, Van Riper and Klein and a group of
about a dozen Marine Corp generals flew to the Mercantile
Exchange in New York to visit the trading floor. Van Riper