Teaching 'Sergeant Arent'
A Decision-Forcing Case
Warning! This page contains information that will spoil your enjoyment of the case in question. To avoid that sad and sorry fate, please begin your engagement with this case at the following page.
The pages that make up this set of case materials can be used in a number of different ways. As a whole, they form a solitaire decision game. As separate pages, they can be used as components of sand-table exercises, interactive slide presentations, or “hip pocket” classes in the field. In, particular, the background section might be used as a before class reading assignment or the basis for an introductory brief. The pages that describe particular problems and their historical solutions can be read aloud, paraphrased, or printed for use as handouts.
The common element in all of these exercises is the maintenance of perspective. That this, whatever else he does, the instructor must take care to ensure that players engage each problem as if they were the protagonist of the case. To that end, the instructor will address each player as “Sergeant Arent” and, in the course of asking questions, make extensive use of second person pronouns. Thus, the instructor should not say “What should Sergeant Arent do?” Rather, he should ask, “Sergeant Arent, what are your orders to your squad?”
The perspective to be maintained, moreover, is not just that of the protagonist of the case, but of the protagonist of the point in time before the decision in question was made. Thus, the instructor should take pains to avoid providing information that Sergeant Arent could not reasonably have possessed when he engaged a particular problem. Thus, for example, when he is at the bottom of the elevator shaft/stairwell of Objective 12, he does not know that, on the other side of the closed steel doors that can see, there are piles of sandbags, steel bars, and a second set of doors. Likewise, when he and his squad land on top of the fortress, neither he nor they know that Objective 12 will lack an observation cupola. Indeed, if this set of case materials has any theme, it is this: “notwithstanding six months-worth of exquisitely thorough preparations, Sergeant Arent and the Third Squad encountered lots of surprises.”
For additional information about decision-forcing cases, decision games of other sorts, and professional military education, please see the various webpages on the other side of the Military Learning Gateway (teachusmc.blogspot.com)