Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers By Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May
Paperback, 329 pages. Published 1986 by The Free Press. ISBN: 0-02-922791-7
I first read Neustadt and May’s book as a student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, I think on the recommendation of Dr. Mike Pearlman, but I cannot remember for sure. After 13 years and facing the prospect of a second career, I thought it prudent to revisit it. My (second) first impression was that I must have internalized much of it the first time. In particular, their “mini method” of placing both individuals and institutions. My second observation is that their methods and maxims are useful, but their examples rely far to much on hindsight. It is easy to conduct a postmortem and determine that some event in an actor’s past or some formative influence on an agency was the crucial element for understanding how that individual or agency would behave. But that doesn’t mean the same or an analogous factor will be dispositive in the next crisis.
Indeed, the authors offer a number of cautions against simplistic analogies. We see them every day in our public discourse–every confrontation with an authoritarian regime is Munich; Donald Trump is a nascent Hitler; every military intervention is Vietnam. As Jon Stewart once said, “you know who you can compare to Nazis? Nazis.”
Nevertheless, Neustadt and Mays’s techniques are beneficial for decision makers. In his speech on the role of the National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley says it is the NSA’s role to get immediately to the question of “what are we trying to achieve” and to stay focused on it. Neustadt and May would respectfully disagree. They argue for the importance of establishing the history of an issue and of the individuals and institutions involved before diving straight to the action required. First, figure out what you know, what you don’t know, and what you presume. These steps will be familiar to anyone familiar with the military decision-making process. “Place” the key individuals and institutions within time and events. What public events shaped the decision makers’ points of view and values? The authors point to Leonid Breshnev’s history and the history of the Soviet state to demonstrate why Jimmy Carter’s early approach on significant nuclear weapons reductions was so ill-advised. In the realm of known/unknown/presumed, they single out the crisis of the “Soviet brigade” in Cuba during the Carter administration. It turned out the brigade had been there since the missile crisis, but nobody in the close decision circle knew that–they just presumed that the brigade was newly arrived.
In 2007, the red team at the 4th Infantry Division, led by then Major Mike Runey, produced one of the finest “placement” documents I’ve ever seen. Mike was a former history professor at West Point, and I have no idea whether Neustadt and May’s book influenced his techniques or not, but they fit exactly. The red team laid out the demographics of Iraq and then placed the largest demographic groups on a timeline of major events. Given Iraqi birthrates, the largest and most dangerous block of men were Shi’ites between 18 and 35. Once we looked at the timeline and realized that the formative event of their lives was the massacre of their fathers, uncles, and older brothers following encouragement and abandonment by the United States, their failure to welcome us as liberators seemed far more rational. Those young men associated Saddam’s repression of their families with American betrayal and blamed us as much as Saddam and the Sunnis.
Neustadt and May seem ambivalent on the formal study of history. They point out examples when those who study it most formally nevertheless make poor decisions while those with a more informal and general grasp of history seem to easily understand events in historical context. They attempt an awkward construct–thinking of time as a stream–to explain their thinking. The analogy to a stream is never clear or very constructive. What Neustadt and May call thinking in a stream is really about having such a firm grasp of history that you can see current events in context without relying on explicit, and flawed, analogies. The study of relevant history establishes context in the mind of the decision maker that allows him to see issues clearly, informed by history but not rigidly guided by a false expectation of repetition.
James W. Vizzard 