- “Why do people have the strategic cultures or traditions that they do? Their cultures emerge from the intense emotional experiences through which they have passed, experiences that created vivid and enduring memories that readily spring to mind. Munich, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, and the war in Vietnam were such experiences. When future, or even present, conditions are difficult to discern, people make decisions based on what they see, and what they see is influenced by their memories of what has happened in the past. Sometimes these are personal memories; sometimes they are organizational or national memories. For example, when confronted with Ho Chi Minh, about whose ultimate intentions there was some doubt, Americans tended to observe that he was an ideological dictator.”
Lesson: Intense emotional experiences like the Cuban missile crisis end up determining people’s strategic cultures and traditions.
Stephen Peter Rosen, “Strategic Traditions for the Asia-Pacific Region” Naval War College Review (Winter 2001): Vol. 54, Issue 1.
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- “A person who had caused a negative emotional reaction in the decisionmaker in the past would be a stimulus that would tend to trigger the same emotional response in the target and a policy choice the opposite of what had earlier caused the negative experience. This emotional response would predispose the decisionmaker toward certain broad courses of action such as trust/distrust, cooperate/fight. After that, the serial evaluation of options would occur in order to specify a course of action consistent with the broad emotional response. This does seem to be what happened as Kennedy and Khrushchev interacted in the period beginning in 1961 and up through the Cuban missile crisis…What is striking is that the process in the Cuban missile crisis, which was a success, and the process in the case of Vietnam have notable similarities. In both cases, a close examination clearly shows that the basic decision was made very early in the process, before it was necessary to decide, and quite clearly before all the relevant information had been received. In both cases, the decision was not changed, or even reconsidered, when important information or analysis was received that was not consistent with the decision. And, in both cases, it is possible to argue that the president acted to avoid domestic political punishment, but only if one is willing to assume that the president would try to stay in office by involving the country in a major war, accepting the possibility of thousands or millions of casualties, and did not care about the domestic political punishment associated with those costs.” (63, 68)
Lesson: Leaders do not use fully rational decision-making processes, including taking into account new information, to determine what course of action to take.
Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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