Abstract
This monograph reviews the U.S. Army's standard methods for problem solving and decisionmaking to see how they might take more account of a commander's intuition at every step. The ideas offered here go beyond the Army's current view of intuition in its latest version of Field Manual 5-0. That version presents "analytical" and "intuitive" as two different types of decisionmaking, for different situations. This divide between analysis and intuition reflects an outmoded view of the human mind that science no longer supports. Recent advances in how the mind works have overturned the old idea that analysis and intuition are two separate functions that take place in two different parts of the brain. In the new view, analysis and intuition are so intertwined that it is impossible to sort them out. Some scientists call the new model of the brain "intelligent memory," where analysis puts elements into your brain and intuition pulls them out and combines them into action.
This new model of the brain finds two striking precedents: research in cognitive psychology on expert intuition, especially by Gary Klein; and On War by Carl von Clausewitz. Both Klein and von Clausewitz put flashes of insight at the heart of problem solving and decisionmaking. Their views on how those flashes happen match quite well what neuroscience now tells us about how the brain works. To describe this phenomenon, von Clausewitz used the term coup d'oeil, or "glance" in French. Here we use coup d'oeil as a shorthand, thanks to its military origins, and "strategic intuition" as a more formal term, where a course of action forms in the mind through a mix of strategic analysis, intelligent memory and expert intuition.