Strategic Decision Making in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Strategic decision success is heavily reliant on the attitudes that managers take toward the decision-making process and toward the decision itself. The Cuban missile crisis is the most well known case of strategic decision making at the level of the nation-state. The nature of the case was such that the use of evaluative frameworks and concepts along with the right managerial attitudes eventuated in a successful strategic outcome. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba. In April 1962 the Soviets began supplying Cuba with military arms in the form of surface-to-air missiles and surface-to-surface cruiser missiles, and later, sometime during the spring of 1962, the Soviets began to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. In order to implement the best strategic decision, the United States, under the command of John F Kennedy, formed the Executive Committee, whose role was to manage the crisis. The introduction of strategic missiles into Cuba was motivated mainly by the Soviet leaders’ desire to overcome the existing margin of U.S. strategic superiority (Harrison, 1999). At the time, the U.S. had a huge nuclear advantage over the Soviets, they had more than eight times as many bombs and missile warheads and they also had 15 strategically placed Jupiter ballistic missiles at Izmir, Turkey (NRDC). At the time, Soviet missiles were only powerful enough to be launched against Europe but the U.S. missiles located in Turkey were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. Krushchev, the Soviet prime minister, thought a deployment in Cuba would double the Soviet strategic arsenal and provide a real deterrent to a potential U.S. attack against the Soviet Union or Cuba.

The Soviet decision to install missiles in Cuba was strategic in many areas, but one area that is often overlooked was the political advantages that the Soviets would gain. This is because a general improvement in the Soviet military position offered

Bibliography: • E.F. Harrison 1999, The Managerial Decision Making Process Fifth Edition, Houton Mifflan Company, Boston, New York. • The History Place, President John F Kennedy Speech On the Cuban Missile Crisis, Viewed 12th May 2008 <http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/jfk-cuban.htm> • Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), Archive of Nuclear Data, viewed 13th May 2008 <http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datainx.asp> • Spartacus Educational, Cuban Missile Crisis, Viewed 14th May 2008 <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDcubanmissile.htm> • ThinkQuest, The Crisis centre, Accessed on 14th May 2008 <http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/days/decision.html> • Wikipedia, Cuban Missile Crisis, Accessed on 14th May 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis>