Probabilistic Reasoning Using Incomplete and Singular or Unique Evidence: Complexity-Based Reasoning Innovation for Commanders

Military commanders face challenges that their counterparts in the business world would confront only in the rarest of circumstances. Commanders must make decisions that place their human and equipment resources in harm’s way. When a commander or senior civilian military decision-maker must commit to an action that endangers the lives of his or her troops, their decisions and the information or evidence that supports their decisions take on a life of their own. The decision-making process becomes complex and adaptive by nature. Like trial lawyers, judges and juries, the commander and staff must weigh evidence about adversary and environments’ capabilities and limitations. This evidence faces different tests for the commander than those of the legal community. The judge and jury can rigorously pursue the evidence to a final conclusion where the commander must often act quickly and precisely on totally incomplete evidence. The judge and jury make decisions on criminal matters that “only” require the proof of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Commanders must protect their assets and are held to the greatest of standards for success or failure—“beyond reasonable doubt” is not always sufficient. They must usually apply concepts such as probabilistic analysis. In this paper, we describe how probabilistic reasoning in cases of apparent unique or singular evidence provides useful insights and is the basis for mathematically sound inferences regarding hypotheses.