Making a Quick Call: Compressing Future Military Decision Cycles with Improved Processes and Technology

Abstract

The U.S. military needs to adopt updated decision-making methods that can fully incorporate cognitive technologies to reduce the time requirements of the human participant. Future military operations hold the promise of real-time information gathering and dissemination. Unfortunately, traditional military "industrial age" decision-making processes are incompatible with this change in the informational landscape. The tempo of military operations will continue to be shackled by the speed of human decision-making unless a significant revision occurs. Military decision cycles need to be updated to make them more time-competitive during the compressed activities of future wars. The U.S. military establishment is following a course to aggressively develop such operational concepts as "Network Centric Warfare" (NCW) and "Rapid Decisive Operations" (RDO). These concepts may create an explosion of data inputs that threaten to overwhelm the military decision framework that traditionally has been organized around the human participant. During the 1960s and 1970s, Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF, endeavored to interpret the mental procedure that a combatant employs to defeat his foe. He originated a construct that is now widely known in the military community as the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) Loop. Much of Boyd's theory is the basis for our current military aspirations to conduct NCW and RDO. Both concepts require the U.S. military to maintain an asymmetrical advantage over our potential enemies' decision cycles. For this to be realized, the observation-orientation-decision phases of the OODA Loop must be streamlined. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored a series of experiments/exercises to develop cognitive technologies that can assist the military decision-maker. These devices support the compression of the decision cycle.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 16, 2002
Accession Number
ADA508372

Entities

People

  • Eric M. Mellinger

Organizations

  • Marine Corps University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Command And Control
  • Control Systems
  • Human Supervisory Control
  • Information Systems
  • Marine Corps
  • Military Education
  • Military Operations
  • Military Organizations
  • Network Centric Warfare
  • Psychology
  • Situational Awareness
  • Social Sciences
  • Supervisory Control
  • Unmanned Vehicles
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control