Devolving command under conflicting military objectives

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2012

In contemporary military endeavours, Command and Control (C2) arrangements generally aim to ensure an appropriate regulation of command-decision autonomy such that decision-takers are able to act in a way that is consistent with the overall set of commanders' intents and according to the nature of the unfolding situation. This can be a challenge, especially in situations with increasing degrees of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, also where individual commanders are faced with conflicting objectives. Increasingly it seems that command decisions are being taken under conditions of internal command contention; for example, when the likely successful outcome of a tactical mission can often be at odds with the overall strategic and political aims of the campaign. The work in the paper builds on our previous research in decision-taking under uncertainty and conflicting objectives, where we analysed the responses of military commanders in decision experiments. We demonstrated how multi-attribute utility theory could be used to represent and understand the effects of uncertainty and conflicting objectives on a particular commander's choices. In this paper, we further develop and generalise the theory to show that the geometrical forms of expected utilities, which arise from the assumption of commander rationality, are qualitatively stable in a wide range of scenarios. This opens out into further analysis linking to Catastrophe Theory as it relates to C2 regulatory frameworks for devolving command decision freedoms. We demonstrate how an appreciation of this geometry can aid understanding of the relationship between socially complex operational environments and the prevailing C2, which can also inform selection and training of personnel, to address issues of devolving command decision-rights, as appropriate for the endeavour as a whole. The theory presented in the paper, therefore, provides a means to explore and gain insight into different approaches to regulation of C2 decision-taking aimed ultimately at achieving C2 agility, or at least at a conceptual language to allow its formal representation. C2 regulatory agents are discussed in terms of detailed functions for moderating command decision-taking, as appropriate for the degrees of uncertainty and goal contention being faced. The work also begins to address implications of any lack of experience and any differences in personality-type of the individual commanders with respect to risk-taking, open-minded-ness and creativity.

2011

UK military commanders have a degree of devolved decision authority delegated from command and control (C2) regulators, and they are trained and expected to act rationally and accountably. Therefore from a Bayesian perspective they should be subjective expected utility maximizers. In fact they largely appear to be so. However when current tactical objectives con ‡ict with broader campaign objective there is a strong risk that …elded commanders will lose rationality and coherence. By systematically analysing the geometry of their expected utilities, arising from a utility function with two attributes, we demonstrate in this paper that even when a remote C2 regulator can predict only the likely broad shape of her agents'marginal utility functions it is still often possible for her to identify robustly those settings where the commander is at risk of making inappropriate decisions.

The U.S. military uses modeling and simulation as a tool to help meet its warfighting needs. A key element within military simulations is the ability to accurately represent human behavior. This is especially true in a simulation's ability to emulate realistic military decisions. However, current decision models fail to provide the variability and flexibility that human decision makers exhibit. Further, most decision models are focused on tactical decisions and ignore the decision process of senior military commanders at the operational level of warfare. In an effort to develop a better decision model that would mimic the decision process of a senior military commander, this research sought to identify an underlying cognitive process and computational techniques that could adequately implement it. Recognition-Primed Decision making (RPD) was identified as one such model that characterized this process. Multiagent system simulation was identified as a computational system that could mimic the cognitive process identified by RPD. The result was a model of RPD called R-PDAgent. Using an operational military decision scenario, decisions produced by RPDAgent were compared against decisions made by military officers. It was found that RPDAgent produced decisions that were equivalent to its human counterparts.

2006

Modeling the decision-making process has been an ongoing undertaking by the scientific, operational and business communities. Research communities have proposed different representations of decision making based on different perspectives like decision sciences, human factors, cognitive and psychological sciences, organisational behaviour, and social sciences. In the Command and Control context, the Observe–Orient– Decide–Act loop has been used since the 50s to describe the C2 process. For some, the military decision-making process might be seen as the full integration of both the Operations Planning Process and the Intelligence Preparation of the Battle space. It is our contention that each of the models has a valid contribution to make in advancing the understanding of the commander's decision-making process, but lack a common context. In order to better comprehend the seemingly disparate approaches, a unified decision-making framework is needed. This paper aims at depicting th...

Simply put, decision theory is concerned with identifying the best decision to take, assuming an ideal decision maker who is fully informed, and fully rational. In a highly complex, interdependent phenomenon such as war the number of decisions soldiers need to make is huge. With growing uncertainties everywhere it is increasingly difficult to make smart decisions. To understand what good decisions are and how to make them, it is important to understand the broader cognitive and social aspects of human decision-making in war.

Netcentric warfare and associated concepts have a fundamental assumption that improved information infrastructures will improve military decision-making and therefore military effectiveness. Previous work on linking NCW applications to military effectiveness using modelling and simulation have had difficulties in modelling the decision-making aspects of the process, and in particular modelling them such that NCW applications can be shown to make a difference. A survey of conceptualisations of decision making suggests that two characteristics of a decision, its speed (or timeliness) and its soundness, and two types of decision making, recognition-based and analytic, constitute a sufficient foundation for modelling. Models based upon empirical timings can be found for decision speed for the two types, however modelling decision soundness is more problematic. A theoretical structure for decision soundness modelling is proposed using situation and decision spaces and constrained by commanders intent. This structure appears to be rich enough in detail to encompass the concepts of commanders intent, decision-makers beliefs and biases etc., but has not yet been practically implemented. Within the structure, situational awareness is represented by a sub-space of possible situations and perturbed by decision-maker biases, commander's intent is represented by a second subspace of possible situations, and decisions are functions from one space to another. Decision soundness is a metric to assess the results of applying a decision function on both the perceived and actual situations and compares these results to the commanders intent or mission objective. The application of the proposed structure to the analysis of maritime interception operations is explored.

2003

Across NATO, there is a growing realisation that the proper representation of Command and Control (C2) within combat models is very important, in the context of major Defence topics such as Digitization of the Battlespace. In addition to the use of current OA models and tools to address immediate requirements, there is thus a need for longer term research to develop methods of properly representing these effects. In consequence, research has been instigated in the UK to investigate ways in which the effects of C2 can be incorporated successfully into constructive simulation models of combat i.e. models which can run in closed form on a computer, and represent the effects of C2, without the need for human intervention during the simulation run. wider span of scenarios in studies, reflecting increased uncertainty in the post-Cold War world. Another reflection of this uncertainty is the need to consider a wide range of sensitivity analysis. These point to the need for constructive simu...

2016

: What are the characteristics of effective ground force commander (GFC) decision making? What commonalities do we see? What are best practices for pre-mission preparation and mission execution? This thesis focuses on GFC decision making in order to investigate how to better prepare leaders for the current operating environment. It examines tactical-level decision making under conditions of uncertainty. It does so by drawing on interviews with combat-experienced commanders. An examination of their thought processes while leading tactical combat elements reveals that mental preparation, vicarious experience, and complex, repetitive training are key components of effective GFC decision making. The thesis concludes with recommendations about how to enhance GFC decision making for future volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments.

1st Annual Conference of the International Technology Alliance, 2007

Abstract—The processes underlying complex collaborative activities such as military decision making are inherently variable. Even within a single organization there are many variants of processes that have the same purpose. When coalition members must work together, these differences may be especially large, baffling and disruptive. Coordination theory provides a method and vocabulary for modeling complex collaborative activities in a way that makes both the similarities and differences between them more visible. To ...

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of warfare. Military decision makers confront uncertainty when the data they encounter are incomplete (missing), ambiguous, or conflicting. This study examined how different categories of uncertainty (ambiguous/missing, conflicting, baseline) affect response time and type of decisions made in a low-fidelity tactical decision making task. Prior to the study, researchers elicited real-world tactical scenarios from veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom in which uncertainty was present. Nine scenarios were developed from the interviews and were given to 28 participants at the Command and General Staff College, FT Leavenworth, KS. Participants were asked to make a decision; their responses were recorded and analyzed. The results indicate that the category of uncertainty and scenario difficulty were significant factors in response time and type of decision made. These findings have the potential to improve human behavior modeling, tactical simulations, and representations of complex task environments.