View of the Combat CAS: Unifying Net-Enabled Teams

摘要

This paper summarizes the results of a series of controlled Human-In- The-Loop experiments with teams of distributed warfighters engaged in combat scenarios enacted on wargame simulators. When viewed in the light of complexity theories, the significant results demonstrate some important empirical regularities. They show generally that increasing the self-similarity of a CAS (Complex Adaptive System), or warfighting team, composed of agents, or individual warfighters, with respect to their shared decision-making processes and shared schema of the battlespace, serves to increase the quality of their shared mental models, including situational awareness and plan quality, and thereby increase the combat effectiveness and agility of the team as a whole. The series of experiments shows, first of all, that teams sharing a common network, decision-making processes and broadened schema of the battlespace increase their self-similarity by moving from use of Local Tactical Picture schema to a Common Operational Picture (COP) schema, thus enabling all team members to share a common input. This initial alignment results in significantly increased situational awareness, shared situational awareness, and combat effectiveness for the entire team. Then moving from COP to Collaborative COP, thus enabling a shared common planned output from the team and shared feedback of results on the COP, yields further significant increases in situational awareness, shared situational awareness and combat effectiveness and agility for the warfighting team as a unit.