Military Decision Making Essay

Life has a way of putting you in a position to make decisions on a daily basis. There are some decisions that are simple. For instance, I should order water with my food instead of soda because of the health benefits and the money I will save. There are some decisions that can be very intense and could cause life or death dependent upon the decision one decides to make. This is especially true when it comes to Army leadership and their decision making process. Each decision a leader decides to make has a specific process that should be followed in order to achieve a desirable, educated outcome. This process is known as the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). This process can be found in Army Doctrine Publication 5-0, The Operations

It’s a decision making process that allows all levels of leadership to apply their input to come up with a plan or order that guides the force to carry out the mission with proper preparation and execution (Odierno, 2012). It allows adjacent, parallel, subordinate, and supporting units a chance to collaborate to come up with unified, thoroughly developed plans of action that are well thought out. The military decision making process isn’t just a “knee jerk” reaction that could lead to disastrous outcomes. It is made up of plenty of steps that involve plenty of input and output, making for great back and forth action to come up with the best possible plan of action when a final decision is

With any type of decision being made you have to know what it is you’re making the decision on. The receipt of the mission could be from various sources, usually higher command or something that has come out of necessity due to a mission that’s already ongoing (Reimer, 1997). The second step of the military decision making process is mission analysis which is the beginning of the actual visualization and problem solving of the process (Odierno, 2012). It’s here that you start defining what it is you need to accomplish, what it will take to accomplish the mission, and get an overall concept of the operation that will need to be carried out (Reimer, 1997). You will start to look at timelines, manpower, and some of the equipment that will be needed to carry out what it is that needs to be done. The third step of the military decision making process is the course of action development (Odierno, 2012). In this step the person in charge would develop a few courses of action depending on what was determined in the mission analysis and get input from everyone involved for guidance and help with anything that should be added. Having as many eyes on this as possible will help with developing a few solid first drafts of a courses of action (Reimer, 1997). The fourth step would be the course of action analysis, also referred to as war-gaming (Odierno, 2012). The war-gaming is