believe it does. When we talk about analytic versus intuitive
decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you
use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance. Suppose
you had a rifle company pinned down by machine-gun fire. And
the company commander calls his troops together and says, ‘We
have to go through the command staff with the decision-making
process.’ That’s crazy. He should make a decision on the spot,
execute it, and move on. If we had had Blue’s processes,
everything we did would have taken twice as long, maybe four
times as long. The attack might have happened six or eight days
later. The process draws you in. You disaggregate everything
and tear it apart, but you are never able to synthesize the
whole. It’s like the weather. A commander does not need to
know the barometric pressure or the winds or even the
temperature. He needs to know the forecast. If you get too
caught up in the production of information, you drown in the
data.”
Paul Van Riper’s twin brother, James, also joined the Marine
Corps, rising to the rank of colonel before his retirement, and,
like most of the people who know Paul Van Riper well, he
wasn’t at all surprised at the way Millennium Challenge turned
out. “Some of these new thinkers say if we have better