| How are important policy decisions made? There are multiple heuristics that have been employed by political scientists, but few of them make use of contemporary control theory heuristics to analyze decision cycles at the national level. However, the difficulty of applying control theory is that it tends to promote rationalistic models that often do not take into account cultural and emotional factors that may strongly shape the actual decision. To bridge these gaps, this thesis seeks to examine the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop postulated by John Boyd as a decisionmaking model and integrate it with strategic culture theory, which provides a means of understanding the non-rational influences that shape decisions. The United States National Security Council's decision to deploy ground troops in support of the Dayton Peace Agreement is used as a case study. |
