ABSTRACT
This book brings together strategic, organizational, and domestic factors and examines their interaction, and to accomplish this the book defines an international political/military crisis and discusses the characteristics that separate it from routine policy making. This chapter develops an integrated framework which will examine factors affecting crisis behavior and attempts at crisis management. An organizational flow model will be developed to illustrate some of the aspects of decision making over time from a perceived crisis to decision implementation. There is no general theory of crisis decisions that will explain all influences and events. There are few aids that even indicate whether two variables are roughly correlated. The factors developed in the chapter are mostly suggestive, and even those have low levels of reliability. The escalatory threat of crisis and the short time for response combine to elevate the responsibility for a decision to the president in the United States and to the top of organizational hierarchies elsewhere.
