attacked, and all of a sudden what Blue Team thought was a
routine “kitchen fire” was something they could not factor into
their equations at all. They needed to solve an insight problem,
but their powers of insight had been extinguished.
“What I heard is that Blue Team had all these long
discussions,” Van Riper says. “They were tying to decide what
the political situation was like. They had charts with up arrows
and down arrows. I remember thinking, Wait a minute. You
were doing that while you were fighting? They had all these
acronyms. The elements of national power were diplomatic,
informational, military, and economic. That gives you DIME.
They would always talk about the Blue DIME. Then there were
the political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and
information instruments, PMESI. So they’d have these terrible
conversations where it would be our DIME versus their PMESI.
I wanted to gag. What are you talking about? You know, you
get caught up in forms, in matrixes, in computer programs, and
it just draws you in. They were so focused on the mechanics
and the process that they never looked at the problem
holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its
meaning.”
“The Operational Net Assessment was a tool that was