Proxy Blowback in the Revolutionary War? The Curious Story of Jane McCrae and the Battle of Saratoga
Major Steve Ferenzi discusses the Battle of Saratoga, social movement theory, and impacts of the Jane McCrae story.
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Tag: psychological warfare
Essay Campaign #14: Tactical Decision-Making, Military Psychology, and the Boyd Cycle
Summer Essay Campaign #14: “Tactical Decision-Making – A Military Psychology Perspective on the Boyd Cycle”
To Answer Question #3: “Where are the human cognitive, psychological, physical limits with respect to combat?”
By Major Jason Spitaletta, USMCR
The US Marine Corps’ doctrinal conceptualization of warfare (HQMC, 1997) is inherently psychological and therefore understanding the human cognitive, psychological, and physical limits with respect to combat are essential and identifying these limits should be the sine quo non of military psychology[1]. Combatants must confront chance, uncertainty, friction (Mattis, 2008), volatility (Laurence, 2011), and urgency (Zaccarro et al, 1995) while contending with existential threats. Combat is a fundamentally uncertain form of competition (Boyd, 1976) where consequential decisions are often based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information (HQMC, 1997), and thus decision-making is the principal human factor in warfare (Krulak, 1999). Boyd’s Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action (OODA) Loop (or Boyd Cycle) is not an answer to the question at hand, but it provides a means of investigating human cognitive, psychological, and physical limits as they relate to tactical decision-making. Bryant (2006) and Benson & Rotkoff (2011) were correct that Boyd’s model was not the result of psychological theory; however, the OODA Loop can be synthesized with the neural process model of automatic multi-structure controlled social cognition, the X and C systems, (Lieberman et al., 2003) as well as Baddeley’s (2003) working memory model to provide a neuroanatomical and cognitive reference point to the original. The combination of the model and those reference points provides us with an appropriate framework through which to describe and address the question at hand.
Read MoreCrimea: Psychological Warfare in Real Time
By Major Matt Cavanaugh
Emile Simpson wrote in his book – War From the Ground Up – about the psychological aspect to warfare (p. 35):
“War is a competition to impose meaning on people, as much emotional as rational, in which one’s enemy is usually the key target audience. Defeat is not a ‘verdict’ handed out by an independent arbitrator of war; defeat is a perceived state which typically is violently forced (or successfully threatened) by one side upon the other.”
In a forthcoming paper for Military Review, I took a hack at defining this tricky psychological battlefield relationship/space – calling it the “human environment” (*as opposed to “domain,” which I prefer, but more on that another time). I defined the human environment as “the sum of physical, psychological, cultural, and social interactions between strategically-relevant populations and operational military forces in a particular war or conflict.”
Either way one chooses to term it, we’re seeing this play out at the last Ukrainian military garrisons in Crimea – in particular Belbek Air Base. The Russians surrounded, and eventually took, the base. Interviews provide a glimpse of the decision forced upon the trapped troops.
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