Solving a Problem With No Solution

First step: Stop asking "what should we do?"

Paul Van Riper is a retired three-star general of the United States Marine Corps. He is probably best known, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as the genius who commanded enemy forces in a 2002 US military simulation, the biggest ever. In a matter of hours, Van Riper’s unconventional tactics sent an enormous, technologically superior US fleet to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. 

But within the Marine Corps, Van Riper is better known as the intellectual who discovered complexity theory in the 1980s, when it was still in its infancy, and recognized how central it was to understanding warfare. In the 1990s, when he oversaw the drafting of Marine Corps doctrine, he made it central to how the Corps operates. In a word, he’s a legend.

But long before all that, Van Riper was a young Marine officer sent twice to Vietnam. He won two Silver Stars for his actions in fierce combat.

I interviewed Van Riper several times in 2017. He is brilliant and has a wealth of stories. But the most startling tale he told me involved little combat, no heroics, and no medals. It was about the time he was handed an impossible problem. And how he solved it. 

I’ve read a lot about design theory and methods for cultivating creative thinking. But nothing I’ve read is as insightful and useful as the story of what Captain Paul Van Riper did in 1968.

By the way, no one calls him “Paul.” In the Corps he is known as “Rip.” And when you speak to him, you sit up straight and say “sir” a lot.

For Marines finishing a long slog through rice paddies and mud with a check for leeches on their legs and groins, the Da Nang air base seemed very far away. The base had tidy streets with parked Chevies. A basketball court. A theater. Men wore clean uniforms, ate food that didn’t come cold from a can, and slept in cots. They even had USO shows. Raquel Welch showed up one time in a miniskirt and Nancy Sinatra boots. Da Nang was paradise. 

“We would occasionally go back, once every couple months, to maybe pick up something or visit some wounded in the hospital,” Rip recalls. “We would see Air Force personnel with bathing suits and towels under their arms headed for the beach. That just didn’t even compute. Bob Hope wasn’t coming out where we were.”

Where they were was only 10 to 20 miles from Da Nang but it was a world away. 

It could have been pleasant countryside, with rice paddies and hamlets and gently rolling hills covered with bamboo and thin trees, but Viet Cong guerrillas in civilian clothes worked among the farmers during the day. At night, uniformed Viet Cong soldiers and North Vietnamese Army troops slipped down from the mountains and crept past the Marines’ hilltop outposts carrying Soviet rockets. 

The rockets were designed to be fired from steel tubes mounted to trucks but the NVA had neither trucks nor tubes, so the soldiers searched for flat clearings where they would heap up mud and dirt into a ramp. When the ramp was the calculated angle, they set the weapons down in rows. Ignited with a roar, the rockets arced through the sky and slammed into paradise.

The Marines were ordered to stop the attacks on Da Nang. So they built more outposts, rolled out more razor wire, placed more mines and claymores, and sent out more patrols. Lines of young men trudged endless loops single-file through the rice paddies and bamboo stands and back to base to burn off leeches and sleep in the dirt. They counted themselves fortunate if they got to that last step as the enemy littered the ground with booby traps. An unlucky boot would graze an invisible tripwire, a tin can packed with explosives salvaged from dud American bombs would detonate, and somebody would lose a foot or a leg and maybe bleed out before he could be choppered back to paradise.

But for all the lost feet, legs, and lives, the attacks only got worse. Every night or two, the quiet darkness in paradise would be torn by up to a dozen detonations, followed by the quieter screams of the wounded. Occasionally, the enemy would coordinate an unholy barrage. A few hours before dawn on July 15, 1967, more than 50 rockets crashed to earth, destroying 10 aircraft, damaging another 40, and injuring 176 Americans. Eight were killed.

The Marines responded with more outposts, razorwire, mines, claymores, and patrols. It made no difference. The rockets kept coming.

Increasingly desperate, the United States brought its industrial and technological might to bear. Engineers stripped a 100 meter-wide ribbon of land of all vegetation and obstacles and ran the ribbon around the airbase and the city of Da Nang in a vast semi-circle. Coils of razor wire were laid around the outer ring of the ribbon, and more coils on the inner ring. Underground sensors were dug in and watchtowers that monitored the sensors were erected. The rockets had an 11-kilometer range but the perimeter was so immense they couldn’t make it to Da Nang if they were launched outside it. And there was no way they could get in to be launched. 

The expense and effort were enormous, but the air base was a linchpin of American planning. The rockets had to be stopped. 

The rockets kept coming. If anything, the pace of attacks accelerated.  

In late 1968, Rip was only 30, but he was an old Vietnam hand, having been a combat advisor to South Vietnamese troops in the early years of American involvement in that sad country, a job that ended when he was shot in the gut and nearly died. Now he was back as the captain in command of Mike Company, third battalion, seventh Marines. Like the other companies, his 200 men were struggling to keep control of their assigned ground — what the Marines called the Tactical Area of Responsibility — but Mike Company’s TAOR wasn’t so bad. It was the one next to theirs that was the launchpad for most of the rocket attacks. There, the commander was holding back the tide with a sponge.

A sense of futility was seeping into the whole regiment. They had tried everything. Officers demanded new ideas but all anyone could think to do was more of the same. In frustration, the regimental commander shifted the companies around, hoping this might somehow shake loose some fresh thinking. 

Mike Company was assigned the worst TAOR. It was now Rip’s job to do the impossible.

Rip spoke to the departing commander. Ignore the ground sensors in the perimeter, the other officer advised. His men used to respond to their alarms but they always found nothing and the men in the towers saw nothing. 

“So the first thing I did when I got this TAOR was to visit the Marine in the tower” where the alarms were monitored and recorded, Rip recalls. He looked at the log book and saw a pattern. “The signals are generally right after dusk or right before dawn. So I asked if light conditions or temperature could set it off. He said, ‘no sir.’ And I thought to myself, ‘these aren’t false readings. They’re really going through there.’ It turned out that these guys were so careful and adept at taking advantage of any little piece of ground that they could hide in or slide through, so that even from that tower, with night vision devices, they couldn’t see them.” 

But thanks to the pattern revealed in the log, Rip now knew where the enemy would be, and when. So he finally had something new to try.

On the banks of rice paddies next to the perimeter hotspots, Rip placed ambushes. The enemy arrived on schedule. The Marines hit them hard. 

It made a difference. “It seemed we’d kill some one night and they wouldn’t come for a couple of nights. Maybe they were licking their wounds.” They came again and the Marines hit them again. It seemed Rip had finally solved the puzzle.

But “adaptive” is the key word in complex adaptive systems, and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were impressively adaptive. The alarms stopped being triggered and the ambushes stopped catching the enemy. The enemy had dropped its old pattern of behaviour.

And yet rockets kept streaking through the night sky and hammering the air base. Somehow, the enemy was still getting through.

Rip was back to square one. What now? More patrols? More sensors? Rip knew better. There had to be something else. He needed ideas. He needed someone who saw things others didn’t and somehow, almost magically, conjured up fresh new thinking. This was 1968, the apex of the Mad Men era. What he needed was a Don Draper. But all Rip had was Marines.

Marines are known for many things but creativity is not one of them. The United States Marine Corps was then, and is now, an organization with exacting standards of conformity and discipline and young men who put square pegs in round holes do not do well in its ranks. Salutes are sharp, marches are in unison, and haircuts are “high and tight.” Even the smallest trivia, like what to call a door (it’s a “hatch”), must be “squared away” (done to standard), or it is unacceptable. 

Commanders do have a little leeway in how standards are implemented, but Rip was demanding even by Marine Corps standards. “I had a reputation as a hard-ass,” he shrugs. In the miserable conditions of the field, Marines often ignored shaving standards. Rip put a stop to that in his company. Nor did they bother with daily calisthenics when they hiked for hours and hours. Rip got them running and doing jumping jacks. Marines also decided what gear they’d take on patrols, until one day, in a firefight, Rip told a Marine to pop smoke and he didn’t have any. From then on, every man in the company packed exactly what Rip ordered, in exactly the quantity, and put it in the pocket Rip designated. There was grumbling, but there was also respect. Rip’s company was truly squared away.

But now Rip had to squeeze creativity out of these well-drilled men with regulation haircuts.

So he called a meeting. His executive officer and platoon commanders were there. An intelligence officer. An artilleryman. Someone from fire support. To an outsider, it would have looked a group of nearly identical Marines. But it was the broadest array of different perspectives Rip could get his hands on. By the standards of the time and place, the group was diverse.

Rip started the discussion by telling them what he didn’t want them to talk about, at least not at first. There was to be not a word about what they should do. Or what they were doing. In fact, they shouldn’t talk about Marines at all.

They were going to start by talking about the situation, Rip said. Starting with the most basic facts.

This approach is as rare as it is wise. There is “an almost irresistible temptation to think first of what to do,” wrote Ernest May and Richard Neustadt in Thinking in Time. This rush to decide means mistaken beliefs about the situation aren’t corrected and assumptions aren’t informed and refined. More seriously, different ways of looking at the problem are not considered — so the different ways of tackling the problem those different perspective may inspire never come to light. 

Such shallow decision-making often leads to failure. Failure often leads to reconsideration. But all too often, that reconsideration is just as shallow as the original thinking.

When the German psychologist Dietrich Dorner asked people to play a simulation of a complex adaptive system — they were governors of a fictional region in Africa told to develop the economy while avoiding ecological or social disasters, like overpopulation or water shortage — they were daunted by the alien environment. So they didn’t rush to action. Instead, they sensibly spent a great deal of time studying the whole situation before thinking about what to do. But when things started to go wrong, they seldom went back to square one and reconsidered the whole, interconnected situation. Nor did they really re-think their plans. Instead, like a company commander ordering more patrols, or changes to the patrol routes, they simply modified what they were doing. They seemed to assume there were no other ways to see the environment, and no other possible courses of action. When tweaking their plans didn’t work, they tweaked them some more. And when that didn’t work, they were stumped.

Rip’s approach was radically different. He started at square one. 

What’s the situation? he asked.

The VC and NVA come down from the mountains, someone said. They slip into range of the air base and fire rockets. They do it at night. 

Do they have to do it at night? 

It seems so. There haven’t been any attacks during the day.

What it is about the night they need? 

The dark, of course. They need it to slip past the Marines. 

How much dark? Have they ever launched rockets on a night with a full moon? 

No. Never have. 

So they need a lot of dark?

Yes, sir. They need a lot of dark.

“Sir,” the artilleryman commented, “if we had 24 hours of daylight we wouldn’t have this problem.” He looked thoughtful for a moment.

“He asks to be excused,” Rip recalls. “He said he had to go get some data. He’s gone for probably an hour.”

So the enemy needs darkness to pull off their attacks, Rip continued. What else? 

Time. It takes time. Those dirt ramps are big. And they’ve got to be the right angle. It takes time to do all that digging and measuring and getting ready to fire. 

How much time? Tough to say. Maybe half an hour.

What else? 

You can’t fire a rocket in water, so the rice paddies are out when they are flooded. You need dry ground. Flat ground.

And it takes some space. They’re not setting off firecrackers out there. 

What’s the minimum ground required? 

Maybe 20 metres by 20 metres. Open ground, too. You can’t fire a rocket through the branches of a tree. 

“So one of my platoon commanders slips away,” Rip recalls.

The artilleryman came back. He had the moon phases and sunrise and sunset times for the next month and “he’s figured out all the sources we have that can fire illumination.” The company’s mortars can fire a dazzlingly bright flare that ignites high above the ground and floats slowly to earth on a little parachute. So can the regiment’s howitzers. Planes can drop flares, too. 

The artilleryman put together a firing schedule. “Sir, there’s never going to be more than 10 minutes of darkness,” he said. Not even the VC and NVA could slip in, set up, and fire in a window that small.

The platoon commander came back with an extremely detailed map. On it, he had highlighted every place where there was at least 20 meters by 20 meters of flat, dry, open ground.

So we have to control these patches of ground, he said. Patrols can do that. 

But there are too many to patrol them all. How else can the enemy be kept from using these sites? 

Dropping a mortar or artillery round on a site sure controls it. So how about we schedule shelling? One round every 15 or 20 minutes. 

So Rip had his fresh thinking: flood the area with light and control potential launch sites. It was a radically different approach.

The plan was implemented in Rip’s TAOR. 

The attacks did not decline. They stopped. Completely. Not one rocket left the ground. The problem with no solution was solved.

“People want to immediately get into solving the problem before they really understand it,” Rip says. But investigating problems without any consideration of solutions can be, paradoxically, the best way to solve them. “The solution emerges from the discourse. When you begin to see the logic of the problem, the counter-logic emerges.” 

Four decades later, Rip’s story helped shape new thinking about how to tackle complex challenges. It’s goes by the bland name “design.” 

Ask military designers what they do and they will immediately say, “we don’t plan.” Planning is examining options and developing a sequence of actions to be undertaken in order to achieve a defined goal. Design is examining the situation from multiple perspectives without any consideration of options or goals. Done well, planning emerges from design — just as Rip’s solution emerged from his conversation about the rocket strikes. 

It’s a genuinely creative approach and it requires no Don Draper, only patient, open-minded, thoughtful exploration. Even Marines with regulation haircuts can do it.