ABSTRACT
The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the issues associated with measuring decision quality, both in the context of structured game environments, in which the moves of both players are severely constrained, and for the combat commander, who may exhibit more creativity in planning and executing a campaign. This discussion will also draw on evidence from the American Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville, in which one general broke two major rules of military doctrine – i.e., made doctrinally “bad” decisions – and still emerged victorious. The goal of the analysis is to guide the identification of candidate metrics of decision quality that are independent of mission effectiveness. It is proposed that this cannot be done in a manner that is free from the context in which the decision is being made, and that for decision support systems to work, a means of encoding this context needs to be developed.
