Sharpening The Combat Edge: The Use of Analysis to Reinforce Military Judgment

From the book preface

This monograph focuses on the use of analysis in combat operations and concentrates on the utilization of techniques in situations with which the authors were personally familiar. It covers primarily the systematic blending of military judgment, data collection, and simple problem solving techniques as utilized in the 9th Infantry Division and II Field Force, Vietnam in 1968, 1969 and 1970. The approach is rather tentative because it was not possible in many cases to determine exactly what factors made the operations go so well. Rather we have laid out the most important and interesting factors in the hopes that the readers will be stimulated and perhaps decide for themselves what the critical points were. Fortunately, a large amount of basic data was available to support the manuscript. On the other hand, some basic data has been lost. In these cases we drew on memory and tried to double check the accuracy of our recollections. We think any general statements are reasonably accurate.