Toward an understanding of the commander´s "coup d´oeil"

In his chapter on military genius, Clausewitz writes about a commander’s coup d’oeil, an ability to make quick and correct decisions on the battle field as something that distinguishes a military genius from the rest of us. Clausewitz had little to say about the basis for this for the ability, however. The present study represents a first attempt to understand the commander’s coup d’oeil as an expression of military expertise. It uses a standard experimental paradigm from psychology for studying experts by assessing their ability to recall of meaningful and meaningless military scenarios. The results of our experiments agree with those from 19 other domains of expertise in showing that experts (army majors in our case) recall meaningful scenarios significantly better than meaningless military scenarios, while for novices (second year army officer cadets and college students of political science) there was no significant difference in recall of meaningful and meaningless scenarios. Thus military expertise manifests itself in the same manner as expertise in other fields. Two explanations for the results are discussed. Both hypotheses assume that experts perform better than novices for meaningful scenarios because they are able to alleviate cognitive load. The first hypothesis assumes that they do so by learning to perceive and utilize the goal-directed constraints of military scenarios, the second that they learn to recognize patterns of military activity. It is noted that it is not possible to distinguish between these two hypotheses on the basis of static scenario displays, and that they may not be that different, since the patterns that are perceived must be related to the constraints. Sensemaking has emerged as a central theme in research on command and control (C2), where it refers to the commander’s understanding of the situation and what should be done. Although the term may be new, the phenomenon is not. Clausewitz writes about it in his celebrated chapter on military genius, with the terminology of his times. He uses the term coup d’oeil, a term popular in among military theorists during the 19 century to denote “. the idea of a rapid an accurate decision was . based on an evaluation of time and space, and consequently received a name that refers to visual estimates only. But soon it was also used of any sound decision taken in the midst of action—such as recognizing the right point of attack, etc. Coup d’oeil therefore refers not alone to the physical but, more commonly, to the inward eye. The expression, like the quality itself, has certainly always been more applicable to tactics, but must also have its place in strategy, since here as well quick decisions are often needed. Stripped of metaphor and of the restrictions imposed on it by the phrase, the concept merely refers to the quick recognition 1 We thank Isabell Andersson and Joacim Rydmark for their assistance in running the experiments and Lieutenant Colonel Sten-Olof Olsson and Major Mats Persson for their help with the scenarios used in the experiments. of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection. ” (Clausewitz, 1834/1989, p. 102, italics in original). Any modern day psychologist or cognitive scientist will feel right at home with this description. It implies that a commander would have what we today would call expertise that allows him or her to make rapid decisions. Clausewitz restricts this ability to commanders of genius. An alternative to his view would be that it expresses the expertise that all officers, also those who are not military geniuses, acquire, at least to some extent, as a result of their training and experience. This is our view and the point of departure for this project, the aim of which is to first demonstrate that officers have the expertise assumed, and then to find the basis of this expertise. As a first step, we adapt a standard experimental paradigm used to study expertise. It was first used by Chase and Simon (1973a) to study expertise in chess, and it has then has been used to study expertise in at least 19 different fields (Vicente & Wang, 1998), from chess to medical diagnosis. We first explain the method with reference to studies of expertise in chess where it originated. We then report three experiments, the results of which allow us to compare the performance of officers with those from other fields of expertise. Finally, we discuss two possible interpretations of the results. The Chase and Simon paradigm for the study of expertise in chess The Chase and Simon (1973a) paradigm is a paradigm designed to assess expertise by studying memory recall. When applied in the domain of chess, it involves comparison of memory recall of the positions of chessmen under two conditions, one where the positions are the result of actual play (meaningful condition) and one where the chessmen have been positioned randomly (meaningless condition) on the chessboard. The participants are allowed to inspect the position for some time. The board is then removed and the participants are given an empty board and a set of chessmen and asked to reproduce the scenario that they have just seen. When this experiment is run with experts (chess masters or grand masters) and novices, there is a remarkable difference in results. Experts recall the positions that result from actual play much better than novices, but for the meaningless positions, there is no difference. Thus, the chess experts do not have better memory generally, not even for chessmen and their positions, but they do have better memory for actual chess scenarios than novices do. This suggests that experts are able to pick up information in the meaningful positions that novices are unable to pick up. As already mentioned, similar results have been obtained in a wide variety of domains, from chess to medical diagnosis (Vicente & Wang, 1998). But so far, there seems to have been no studies of officers. Yet, the generalisation to officer expertise seems straightforward; chess is, after all, a war game. Below we present three experiments using the Chase and Simon (1973a) paradigm adapted to the study of the expertise of officers. The three experiments differ with respect to the level of expertise of the participants. In Experiment I the participants were Army Majors from the Higher Staff Officer Program at our college and they constitute our expert condition. In Experiment 2 the participants were second year army officer cadets, and in the third they were college students taking courses in political science, our two novice conditions. In the experiment, the participants were asked to recall positions of military units placed on a map under a condition where the positions were meaningful militarily and a condition where the units had been placed as near randomly as possible (with certain restrictions described below). We expect to have a strong effect of meaningfulness for experts and no effect for novices (or at best a very weak one).