Most observers of US foreign policy decision-making would probably agree that, whatever the virtues or defects of a particular policy choice, the process by which decisions are reached on crisis or incipient crisis situations leaves something to be desired. Despite good intentions, there persists an all-toofrequent tendency to be taken by surprise, to lurch from crisis to crisis, to under-use instruments of preventive diplomacy, and to be faced with situations in which only undesirable military options are available.The Nixon administration has identified some aspects of this problem, and announced various organizational and methodological means to overcome them. The results to date are, to say the least, not entirely convincing.And while as Americans our first concern is with US policy, the problem is by no means confined to the US decision-making apparatus. Rather, this tendency represents a weakness of governments in general, and of in-ternational organizations such as the United Nations, in anticipating and forfending unwanted and undesirable policy outcomes.If we define &dquo;crisis&dquo; as a short-time, highthreat, unexpected political-military situation (Hermann, 1969, p. 29), it is clear what some of the difficulties are for harassed and fallible humans to act in ways that are generally defined as systematic, if not &dquo;rational&dquo;. Surely rational decision-making connotes, at a minimum, processes of information search, comparison or contrast with other experience, and application of principles derived from previously validated propositions.Anyone who has worked in the crisis business is painfully aware of the customary inadequacy of information; of how other situations seem to be remote or unhelpful; and the way in which curbstone judgments, horseback opinions, and gut reactions constitute invariable substitutes for explicit systematic analysis.And crises are different and demanding, but because of the exigent nature of crises, advance planning becomes even more a necessity. Yet in the American policy community, many of the needful arts of the systematic policy planner-anticipating, forecasting, acting preventively, preparing contingent plans-have been treated at best on suffrance, at worst as exotic and harmfully '