Assessing Military Professionals’ Endorsement of Decision-Making Assumptions: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

This study examines how military professionals interpret claims about decision making in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. A survey of active-duty personnel (N = 225) from the Norwegian Armed Forces (2024–2025) was used to assess whether endorsement of Klein’s 11 decision-making claims reflects a unified construct or several distinct decision-making beliefs. After removing two items with insufficient communalities, exploratory factor analysis (principal axis factoring with Oblimin rotation) was conducted on the remaining nine items. Sampling properties were adequate (KMO = 0.741; Bartlett’s χ2 (36) = 282.86, p < 0.001). Comparative model testing indicated that a two-factor structure provided a better fit than a unidimensional model, accounting for 29.24% cumulative variance. The resulting dimensions—Planning/Structure (e.g., “Identify and mitigate risks,” loading 0.618) and Analytic/Evidence-based practices (e.g., “Prefer logic over intuition,” loading 0.556)—showed acceptable internal reliability (α = 0.65 and α ≈ 0.71). These findings suggest that military professionals’ endorsement of Klein’s framework is not unidimensional but instead reflects two complementary attitudes about effective decision making. This bifactorial structure offers a theoretically grounded basis for advancing research on adaptive decision making in the military and other high-stakes operational contexts.