CTAC:
Today Army Brigades/Unit of Action(UA) are faced with complex and evolving
missions where they often need to operate with joint or coalition forces,
with few personnel, in a network centric fashion and to respond rapidly
and effectively.
In today's army the command and control structure itself
can enable or inhibit dynamic decision making by impacting what
information gets whom, when, and how they act upon it due to various
factors such as social influence and available resources. The variety of
information available, the complexities of the underlying technologies,
rapid changes in personnel and high variance in missions means that unit
leaders cannot simply rely on experience to know who knows what, can do
what, is doing what, and has experience working with whom – all of which
are critical factors in making timely and effective decisions.
Rather,
during planning, the unit leaders need a way to asses the human and
organizational based strengths and vulnerabilities in the C2 structure,
reason about proposed changes, and so devise more effective and adaptive
structures that facilitate effective decision making in a dynamic
environment. Further, during engagement, the unit leader needs a way of
estimating the extent to which the planned structure is still appropriate,
the extent to which attrition and resource consumption has mitigated the
effectiveness of the planned structure, and locate opportunities on the
fly for redesigning the C2 in ways that maintain effective decision
making. We propose to adapt, utilize, and evaluate a tool (ORA) for
assessing vulnerabilities and strengths in a unit's C2 structure under
dynamic conditions.
The proposed work is divided into two tasks with
subtasks under each. Task 1 is the basic proposal, and were additional
funding available the work in Task 2 would also be done. The focus of Task
1 is on augmenting ORA to include the SA measures determined to be critical
in prior work, provide visuals to the unit leaders of the structures,
collect additional data during three new battlelab experiments, do
additional validation of existing measures, and identification of core
measures to provide in a customized report. In Task 2, we enable greater
capability by doing a meta-analysis of the findings from previous and task
1 experiments to identify whether other measures were needed, add in role
feature based measures, do a usability assessment, develop explanation
based information to facilitate the use of ORA by soldiers in the field,
and explore the feasibility of running computer simulations to predict
longer term team behavior.
CTAC's goal is to study Network Centric Battle Command in the US Army's developing Unit of Action, Unit of Employment Tranformation Force.
The US Army Battle Laboratories are conducting experimentation and simulation to determine how a networked organization can and should behave. CMU has partnered with the Battle Laboratories to develop a research method to collect, analyze, and model networked organizations. The methodology relies upon Dynamic Network Theory. This research furthers Dynamic Network Theory into C2 organizations and is a simple, cost-effective tool for measuring, integrating, comparing, and analyzing results across experiments.