Towards Dominant Battlespace Comprehension in Network Centric Warfare

摘要

Wars in the XXIst century will place unprecedented demands on the commander's ability to make critical decisions under volatile conditions and extreme time pressure. Advances in information technology and cognitive science have made possible new types of decision aids that can help commanders to meet those demands. Design of commander decision aids for Network Centric Warfare is in the focus of this paper. The first section treats command and control in terms of dynamic asset allocation and considers the cognitive complexity of allocation decisions under shifting constraints and priorities. The next section compares two decision strategies: 1) template-matching and 2) creative utilization of past experiences under conditions that are rapidly changing and have no exact precedents. We argue that creative and efficient application of rules and past experiences requires battle space comprehension and suggest that current decision technologies do not recognize the role of comprehension and thus overlook a fundamental prerequisite for efficient command and control. The third section outlines a model of expert commander decision processes, and defines a new approach to the design of decision aids that facilitate commander's comprehension of the battle space and help to increase the speed of control and self-synchronization in highly mobile and geographically dispersed forces.