Mind on the battlefield: what can cognitive science add to the military lessons-learned process?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of combining the detailed military history of actual battles with contemporary decision-making cognitive theories. Specifically, we analyse two battle decisions made in Israeli-Arab wars, and interpret, through a cognitive lens, some of the decisions that were subsequently deemed “incomprehensible” in the civilian and military literature. This perspective permits analysis of multiple processes – such as risk evaluation, mental completion of unknown information, and estimation of enemy response. Moreover, it predicts that even highly experienced commanders are prone to the effect of cognitive biases, and may therefore make bad decisions with disastrous consequences.

KEYWORDS:

• Tactical decision-making
• cognitive biases
• military history
• imaginability bias
• overconfidence bias
• military lessons-learned

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The supporting data for the findings of this study is available on request from the corresponding author, Dalit Milshtein.

Notes

1. The question of how much more information benefits decision-making efficiency is also debatable. For example, it has been suggested that under ecological conditions (rather than controlled laboratory ones), experts’ decision-making can be improved, and judgements made more accurate, by actually ignoring information (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011). Similarly, previous studies found that although military decision-making uncertainty was reduced as information increased, it did not improve plan quality, or reduce planning time (Thunholm 2008).

2. By “alternative scenarios,” we mean mental structures or representations that are different from the present state of affairs, or from the information available to the decision-maker (for recently review, see the Milshtein and Henik 2024).

3. For example, it has been suggested that quick decisions are based on unconscious and associative processes that ignore parts of the information. These heuristic-based decisions or judgments may be highly economical and usually effective (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011; Kahneman 2011). On the other hand, heuristics may provide non-optimal solutions (Wójtowicz and Winkowski 2018). In other words, heuristic strategies for quick decisions could provide practical but somewhat unreliable decisions.

4. Recent findings suggest that reducing the problem-solving confidence of junior field commanders predicted better performance (Calleja, Hoggan, and Temby 2020).

5. The present Russian-Ukrainian war may provide another demonstration of the optimistic bias in wartime decision-making. The Russian government assumed it would be able to replicate in Ukraine the success they had gained in putting down the Syrian rebellion, despite being aware of the fundamental differences between the two battlefields. This bias persisted after their military failures in the first phase of the war. More generally, the failure of the optimistic Russian predictions of Ukrainian and NATO responses resulted in heavy Russian losses in terms of casualties, weapons, international relations, and even damage to President Vladimir Putin’s personal reputation within the intra-Russian political arena.

6. The formation of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) as a conventional military actually began shortly after the war had commenced.

7. Reconstructing a battlefield in general – and in the specific cases in question in particular – is not a simple matter, and involves great disagreements between researchers. Posing questions about commanders’ responsibility for events also triggers an emotionally charged discourse. Nevertheless, despite the differences between various accounts, we believe it is impossible to ignore the questions that arise with regard to the tactical decision-making.

8. Part of the source material for this vignette is based on personal communications with: Y. Avni; I. Ben-Barak; A. Bannai; M. Carmel; Y. Ezroni; S. S. Hanafas; Y. Pundack; Y. Reshef; M. Šacheviz; and R. Weitzreiber. For comprehensive review on the war see Kimche, and Kimche (1960); Lorch (2019); the Milstein (1996).

9. Part of the source material for this vignette is based on personal communications with: G. Kopel; G. David; Y. Mordechai; and Y. Barkan. For a comprehensive review of the war, see Aker (2014); Gawrych (2015).

10. Major-General Haim Bar-Lev, the IDF’s former Chief of Staff (CoS), 1968–71, and then a minister in the Israeli government. During the war he was urgently called back into active reserve service due to Israeli military failures on both northern and southern fronts (Milstein 1993).

11. On October 15, the Israeli 14th Brigade had tried unsuccessfully to break through the Tirtur Route. Survivors of the battle and the brigade’s armoured battalion soldiers reported encountering enormous numbers of Egyptian infantry fighters (14th Armored Brigade, IDF 1975; Division 162 reports, IDF, as cited in Ben Dor 2010; Reshef 2011)

12. In this matter see also The Agranat State Commission, January 28, (1975) (1975); Ben Dor (2010)

13. A Forward Observer is an officer responsible for artillery support direction and friendly fire prevention.

14. Yairi had been Bar-Lev’s chief of staff while the latter served as the IDF’s supreme commander (Ben Dor 2010).

15. For instance, one of his sources was Lt. Col. Michael Ben-Ari Kapusta – one of the founders of the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, which Yairi later commanded), and a role model for Yairi’s generation of officers (the Milstein 1985, 2019).

16. As it happens, in both cases, these assumptions were false: Kibbutz Yehiam was not, in fact, under siege, and received supplies on a regular basis (the Milstein 1996(, and in 1973, while Yairi’s soldiers were being killed on the Tirtur Route, other troops managed to reach the Canal by a parallel route (Ben Dor 2010; Tzur 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dalit Milshtein

Dr. Dalit Milshtein is a neurocognitive researcher. She received her PhD from the School of Brain Sciences and Cognition at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Her research interests include decision-making, mental manipulation, collective experience, and social dynamics. She previously worked in the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Haifa University and is currently affiliated with the Social Intelligence Group at Humboldt University Berlin.

Avishai Henik

Dr. Avishai Henik is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has over 300 publications and studies attention, emotion and numerical cognition. Dr. Henik has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant to continue his cutting-edge research on numerical cognition. In addition, he won a Humboldt Research Award, in recognition of accomplishments in research and teaching, and the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence Mentoring Prize 2020, for demonstrated leadership in fostering the careers of neuroscientists.

Eviathar H. Ben-Zedeff

Eviathar H. Ben-Zedeff is a research fellow in the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in the Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel, and joint-coordinator of the Alfredo Workshops for Defence. He was the editor of the Israeli Defence Forces’ Ma’arachoth professional magazine. He holds a BA degree in History and International Relations from The Hebrew University at Jerusalem and an MA in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on Israeli military history, terrorism-press relations and military- press relations.

Uri Milstein

Dr. Uri Milstein is a philosopher of war, an independent war researcher and an expert in after-action debriefing. He fought in the IDF’s) Israeli Defence Forces (Paratroopers Brigade and the reserves, where he served as a soldier and combat medic on the front lines until the first Lebanon War in 1982. In addition, he served as an investigator and historian of the Israeli Paratroopers Brigade. He authored a four-volume history of IDF paratroopers, as well as a four-volume history of the beginning of the1948 Israeli-Arab war in Hebrew and English. He is currently working on a thorough study of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war and the foundation of the State of Israel that will include thirty books, eleven already published. He has authored scores of papers and books about significant battles in all Israeli wars. He developed and published a security philosophy based on the “principle of survival” in both Hebrew and English. He often publishes detailed military debriefings in the Israeli press.