8 October 2017

Cosmic Decisions: A Ptolemaic View of Military Decisions

By Daniel Sukman

One of the more complicated aspects of war is how military commanders and civilian policymakers arrive at decisions. At each level of warfare, from the tactical to the strategic, and including the cross-cutting institutional level of war, speed and consequences in decisions vary. Thinking about the speed of decisions in terms of planets, revolving in an orbit at various distances from the center offers a method to conceptualize the various speeds. Each orbit accounts for one decision at the various levels of war. Moreover, the decision space at each of the levels of war occurs in the context of the security environment.

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