Blink, Chapter 3

Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory:

Creating Structure for Spontaneity

“We make our decisions, then we turn around and our decisions

make us”

Retired Lieutenant General Paul “Rip” Van Riper

• 41 years in Marines• Vietnam, Desert Storm• Went to California State, PA• 2006 joined other Generals

in calling for sec. defense Rumsfeld’s resignation.

• Why? Because of the direction Rumsfeld has taken the military

decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star Medal with gold star, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V", the Purple Heart, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Navy Achievement Medal, and the Combat Action Ribbon with gold star.

• What kind of guy is rip?– In charge of Mike company

(~150 men)• Stationed in treacherous rice

paddy and hill country

– job was to stop N. Vietnamese from firing rockets into Danang

• Attacks went from twice a week to one in three months

– Men describe him as• Strict, fair, concise, direct, a

gunslinger,• Would take 9 men against 100

and win.• Not, “live and let live”

So he’s a jarhead, so what?

• 2000 the pentagon approaches him to be in the largest war game simulation in history

• Millenium Challenge ’02– 250$ mil– What if a rogue military

commander breaks from his gov’t in the Persian Gulf?

– What if he’s got a strong powerbase, 4 loyal terrorist groups, and a strong hate for America?

– This is Van Riper’s part.

Stupid terrorist. Don’t set yourself on fire.

United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM)

• Pentagon’s testing grounds for new military strategies.

• In war game’s the good guys (US) are always blue, the bad guys are red.

• History lesson: – in 1950’s colors was Red=Dem, Blue = Rep– David Brinkley described Reagan’s victory as a sea of blue– In 2000 It was Red=Rep Blue =Dem– Strangely the rest of the world uses Red for communism liberalism, blue

for conservative

• History lesson: – in 1950’s colors was

Red=Dem, Blue = Rep– David Brinkley

described Reagan’s victory as a sea of blue

– In 2000 It was Red=Rep Blue =Dem

– Strangely the rest of the world uses Red for communism liberalism, blue for conservative

• Purple America– Division is not so

simplistic– View data at a smaller

geographic level– PA has “T”

Back to Millennium Challenge

• At HQ both teams had big rooms with lots of computers– Around country units stood

ready to enact orders– Sometimes when a

simulated missile was fired a real missile was fired

• 17 day event, everything monitored

• The red team was modeled on Israel but really…

• This was full war rehearsal for war with Iraq

Blue (US) = big dog, big toys

• Used Operational Net Assessment– Decision making tool– Matrix that shows military,

social, economic, and political strengths and weaknesses.

• Effects-Based Operations– Tool to guide decisions

beyond traditional military methods

• They had pretty much everything the pentagon has

Network Centric Warfare• robustly networked force improves

information sharing; • Information sharing enhances the

quality of information and shared situational awareness;

• Shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self-synchronization, and enhances sustainability and speed of command; and

• These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness.

• Bottom line: It’s good when everyone knows what everyone else is doing all of the time.

• You should have a pager so you’re parents can call you whenever they want.

• Napoleon said, ”A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is.”

• War is a fog• JFCOM is testing that

idea• Van Riper thrived in that

idea• What do you think? Is it

that way in the class? On the football field?

Decisions under pressure

• Van Riper advocates rational analysis, but not in the thick of things when there is no time to compare options calmly

• From Sources of Power Book– A study of how nurses & firefighters

make decisions– When experts make decisions they

don’t compare all options– Survival happens because of

experience & Intuition

• Once Van Riper got a bunch of generals Stock traders to trade places. Generals can trade stocks on the floor and traders are great at war games.

Back to Millennium Challenge ‘02

• Blue team pours in thousands of troops & Park an aircraft carrier offshore of Red team’s home base. Knocked out Red’s microwave towers & fiberoptic lines so he’d have to use cell phones which could be monitored.

• Blue team says surrender. Based on all computer models you can’t win

• Drop. Your. Sword.

• Van Riper: circumvented communications obstacles using motorcycle couriers, semaphore, and light signals.

• Sent out a fleet of small boat craft to track invading ships and bombards blue navy with an hour of cruise missile attacks sinking 16 blue ships and killing 20K.

• If they were going to be preemptive, I was going to fire first.

• Why didn’t blue team see this coming?

• Van Riper created the conditions needed for spontaneous playing to occur.

• Spontaneity requires rules and guidelines to be successful.

• An interception doesn’t matter if you don’t have the training to know what to do next.

• In the 70’s and 80’s Lester Haye’s covered his chest and hands with adhesives to help him become a leading interceptor

You’re at command and you hear gunshots. What do you do?

• Van Riper did nothing. If people needed help they’d call.

• If you call them they’d say anything to get you off their backs if under fire.

• Otherwise they could work it out on their own.

• Kind of like our labs at times.

• Be in command, but out of control. It’s like Jazz

• Overall guidance comes from the top, but forces in field are not to depend on intricate orders from command.

• Get to the top of the hill, I don’t care how. You know how to do it best because you’re there and I’m not.

• Required: Trust• Risks: messy, lack of info• Benefits: Creates system

for rapid cognition

Verbal Overshadowing

• Think of a stranger you’ve seen recently

• Could you pick them out of a line up?

• This is unconscious recognition• Could you write a paragraph

describing them in detail?– Probably not. – Left part of brain thinks in words,

Right side of brain thinks in pictures.

• Police Sketch

Who am I writing about?

• An old wrinkled guy with loung frizzy hair, a bulbous nose, big moustache, and a sweater?

Who am I talking about?

• Black guy with a little moustache, squarish shaped head, big forehead, receding hair line, a little fat on his cheeks, but strong looking?

Who am I talking about?

• Pretty light blond white woman, big red lips, bangs, clean skin, cleavage, not exactly smiling, pouty eyes, pointed eyebrows

Who am I talking about?

• Handsome dark haired guy. Wears glasses & so good looking it hurts, a good sense of fashion, ripped with muscles?

• The point is that too many words can confuse our visual understanding of the situation. As illustrated with insight puzzles. A.K.A. Lateral thinking puzzles

• A man & his son are in a serious car accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps, “This child is my son!” Who is the doctor?

• This doctor is the boy’s mother

• A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a 100$ bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

• Set it on fire

Inverted pyramid in a mall by the Louvre in Paris

• How can two people stand behind each other?• Stand back to back• A woman had two sons who were born on the

same hour of the same day of the same year but they were not twins. How?– They are two of a triple/quadruple...

• Two sons and two fathers go fishing. They each catch one fish. The total number of fish they caught was only 3. – It is a grandfather, a father, and a son. The father is a

son to the grandfather, and a father to the son. • A child is born in Boston, Massachusetts, to

parents who were both born in Boston, Massachusetts. The child is not a United States citizen. – The child was born before 1776.

• A guy had people solving these puzzles.

• Had some groups write down everything the could remember about how they tried to solve the problems. These groups solved 30% fewer.

• Paralysis through analysis• Blue team suffered from it.

– Failed to keep a holistic p.o.v.– In tearing apart a situation

while in the middle of it, they lost its meaning.

Battle Of Chancelorsville

• Late April 1863

• Robert E. Lee’s “Perfect Battle”

• Sitting on opposite sides of the Rappahannock are Fighting Joe Hooker’s Army of the Potomac with 134K men and twice the artillery of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

• Jackson died at this battle from friendly fire.

Joe Hooker

Robert E. Lee

• Hooker whose command tent is half bar half brothel has better intelligence than Lee.

• Two hot air balloons give troop positions

• Hooker sneaks half his forces around

• Lee is between two armies now. Both bigger than his

• Hooker expects retreat

Darth Vader Hot Air Balloon

• Lee goes on the defensive and sends troops to get captured with fake messages about another confederate, James Longstreet, about to arrive with reinforcements.

• Lee divides his troops and sends Jackson out to face the army coming up the back

• Hooker calls a halt. Lost faith in himself.

• Cost several officers their jobs.

Cook County Hospital, 2 miles from downtown Chicago

• Inspiration for the TV show ER.

• In 90’s changed the way they diagnose chest pain complaints

• Another way to understand why Van Riper won

• Cook County was the last resort for anyone in Chicago with no Health Insurance.

• Strained conditions– Once doctors trained a

homeless man to run lab tests

– No AC till late 90’s– Police had patients from the

jail cuffed to gurneys– 250K emergency patients a

year– For comparison UPMC

Presby had 90K patients in 2006.

– Smart people got hurt in the morning and packed a lunch and dinner.

• Question of dealing with heart attacks was front and center. ~ 30 people a day came

in thinking they were having a heart attack

– Use up resources– Protocol was long and

inconclusive

• Nurse takes B.P., Doctor listens with stethoscope, Series of questions. How long, Where does it hurt, Exercise, Trouble before, diabetes, then technician hooks up electrodes, gets an EKG, EKG’s aren’t perfect. To know with certainty if a patient is having a heart attack requires tests that take hours

• Doctors make an estimate

• Reilly checked for consistency• Gave staff case studies and asked

for diagnosis• No Consistency. Found one doctor

might send a patient home when another might admit him.

• About 2-8% of the time in American hospitals a patient having a myocardial infarction is sent home.

• So doctors err on the side of caution and often admit people not sick.

• Wastes resources.

• What if you have a patient in the ER who complains of sever chest pain, old, smoker, diabetes, & high blood pressure, but his EKG is normal?

• Some doctors say ignore EKG.

~10% of those admitted to hospital on suspicion of heart attack actually have heart attack.

• Each patient in a bed at Cook County cost the hospital 2000$ a night.– Typical Chest pain patient stayed for 3 nights– Doctors argued over who got to stay

• Enter Dr. Lee Goldman

• In 70’s fed 100’s of Heart Attack cases into a computer and got an algorithm

• This equation and 3 variables had a decision tree to decide on treatment

• Needed real world testing that no one ever did

• Till now.

• Interesting note, Goldman’s study paid for by Navy

• Because if you’re on a sub and someone’s complaining of chest pains do you have to surface and give away your position?

• Nowaday’s Lee Goldman is the head of Columbia University Medical Center

• Reilly started using Goldman’s Algorithm

• Led to a 70% increase in accuracy

Less Is More

• Too much information can confuse

• Out of the thousands of lifestyle and genetic variables that contribute to the chances of a heart attack Goldman narrowed it down to 3 that mattered most.

• Gottman (90% accurate about predicting success of relationships guy) had 4 factors that killed relationships.

• We have 10 commandments.

• Once a study was done where groups of therapists analyzed a case study. Then they were given more info, and reanalyzed, then more, and reanalyze.

• After each round they got more confident, but not any more accurate

Back to Millineum Challenge `02

• Van Riper did his research before the exercise started.

• Once hostilities began meetings were brief.

• Rapid Cognition is possible.• Just because you can see a

whole chessboard it’s not certain you’ll win. You can’t see your opponents mind. But if you’ve played lots of chess it matters.

• After the attack JFCOM Reset the game.

• Ordered a change to Van Riper’s tactics.

• He would fire 12 missiles that got shot down

• The second time around Van Riper’s action were scripted and if the blue team didn’t get what they wanted they ran it again until they did.

• Blue Team won the millennium challenge round 2

• Declared the fog of war lifted.

• New Network-Centric Warfare = hooray

• Had the ideal way to deal with Iraq.

• So how hard could a war with Iraq be if we have all the information?

Dark Lord Rumsfeld

• If they rescripted the game was MC`02 a waste of 250mil?

• Did we learn things or create a sense of infallability?

• Van Riper likens Rumsfeld to a guy named Robert McNamara. E.C. Who is he?

McNamara• Defense Secretary from 1961 -

1968

• Suggested that Kennedy fund Cuban rebels in a Bay of Pigs invasion that pretty much led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest we’ve ever come to Nuclear War.

• He was also the guy who did such a great job in Vietnam, until he started disagreeing with Johnson and saying we should get out.

• Engineered so many mistakes in Vietnam

• Might have known about Agent Orange mutagenic effects which still occur today.

• The world is the way it is today because in part because of him.