DECISION DOMINANCE


FACING OFF


Knights on a chess board, like Soldiers on the battlefield, must prepare accordingly for battle.


confidently move their chess piece to the next best position, prepared for whatever move the opponent might make.


Military leaders find themselves facing the same set of challenges in today’s complex, multi-varied threat environment. Tey must understand their position, look ahead across multiple scenarios and make time-sensitive decisions based on real-time changes, all with the knowledge that each decision may have lasting consequences far into the future. Many science and tech- nology (S&T) labs and centers within the Army, including the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) C5ISR Center and Army Research Laboratory, are working on programs of significant impact in bringing needed sensing and network capabilities to our Soldiers. Army S&T is dedicated to investing in technologies that support our Soldiers’ constant situational understand- ing of the battlespace and provide future military leaders with information needed for significant decision-making advantage over the opposition.


CHESS AND DECISION DOMINANCE Chess is a game of decision dominance, where one player’s decisions are ultimately


110 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2022


proven better than the other. Tis decision dominance often leads weaker players to recognize their position and resign before the game is over. It's the same in the mili- tary: the goal of decision dominance is not to destroy your enemy, but to force the enemy to surrender or not go into war against you in the first place. It's the desire to outthink rather than obliterate your opponent, moving away from the "war of attrition" to a "war of decision."


"Decision dominance is now possible by exploiting technology and innova- tion to achieve long-term success through economical effects-based planning," wrote U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Merrick E. Krause in a 2003-article for Defense Horizons, a National Defense University publica- tion. "Tis concept is a departure from the traditional Napoleonic war-fighting philosophies of attrition or annihilation," Krause said.


"Science is about gaining useful knowledge in a systematic way to solve problems," writes Devin Camenares, the author of the chess blog "the Science on the Squares." "Chess players engage in a similar activ- ity all the time if even subconsciously, studying games and reading literature to build a model of the game in their mind


that can be applied to making decisions at the board. Likewise, scientific knowl- edge about the natural world has informed incredible advances in technology for a wide range of industries."


Like chess players, military leaders must be empowered with the resources needed to apply the same study and scientific approach to solving military challenges. Camenares has identified three areas where science and a scientific approach can bene- fit chess players in decision making and, by extension, can have broader application to military decision-making: Informatic analytics, position analytics and psycho- logical analysis.


UNDERSTANDING THE BOARD Informatic analytics is about trying to know as much as possible about your opponent, the board and the game in advance. It’s about creating scientific metrics around human decision-making processes and understanding how that shapes the environment in which you are engaged. In chess, informatics could be applied to make predictions about the winning chances offered by a certain open- ing move. Other questions that could be answered include which squares are most


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