Split Decision

rom the siege of Troy to the battle of Mogadishu, confusion has been an abiding feature of military operations. No wonder then, that in this age of technological revolution, military planners are turning to new technologies to address a problem as old as warfare itself. Besides building more lethal and efficient weapons, each of the services is pursuing better ways to manage and distribute information, all in the hope of rendering order to the most disorderly of endeavors. From the Navy's networked platforms to the Army's digital battlefield, the services are striving for nothing less than what the Pentagon is billing as "total information dominance."

But while precision-guided munitions have replaced the spear as the weapon of choice in much of the world, and troops at all levels of command have access to vastly more information than ever before, the underlying mechanism for using those weapons and making decisions in the heat of battle-the human thought process-remains relatively unchanged. Some fear that the technology of warfare is fast outpacing troops' ability to assimilate it.

"It is a requirement, a necessity, for us to start to look at the human side of the systems we are building," says retired Navy commander Alan Zimm, now at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "It used to be that the science was the limitation. Well now we have the capability to vastly overload the human end." Zimm is concerned that promising new technologies have so dazzled military leaders that they have become blinded to the most important element in employing those technologies-the ability of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to use them effectively.

This lack of attention to the human side of war was recently brought home when Zimm attended a military conference and war game at Fort Belvoir, Va. Called the Technologies Initiative Game, the simulation exercise was designed to explore future operations and development issues. "They [military planners] had invited every futurist they could think of-people in electronics, people in physics, people in communications, missile people-but there was not one social scientist invited to the conference," Zimm recalls. That oversight-indeed, the fact that few, if any, attendees even perceived the oversight-speaks volumes about the military's technology-centric thinking, he says.

Human Factors

Understanding the relationship between military personnel making decisions in combat-where stress is extraordinarily high and time is short-and the information that is increasingly available to them through high-tech weapons is essential if the military is to operate effectively.

Given the massive amount of data now available to troops, knowing what to know is one of the most difficult problems a commander faces, says Zimm. As an example, he cites the case of Capt. Will Rogers of the Navy cruiser USS Vincennes, whose decision in July 1988 to shoot down Iran Air Flight 655, which he mistakenly believed was an Iranian fighter jet, resulted in the deaths of 290 civilians. Capt. Rogers, who had been warned about potential air attacks just days before the incident, made his fatal decision under immense pressure, focusing on the Iranian jet's course, speed, altitude trends and radio broadcasts-a fraction of the information that was available to him from the ship's Aegis weapons system. Had Rogers given equal consideration to other available information, he might have come to a different conclusion and a tragedy might have been avoided. In fact, the captain of the fast frigate USS Sides, which was operating in the Persian Gulf with the Vincennes, concluded that Flight 655 was a commercial jet.

The different conclusions of the two captains were perhaps inevitable, Zimm says, given the unique circumstances surrounding each officer's decision-making process. The point, he says, is that the military would do well to learn more about how people make such decisions with the high-tech tools at hand.

But he's not optimistic. Between the military's "can-do" culture, where perseverance is deemed sufficient to overcome human limitations, and the current, resource-constrained budget environment, Zimm doesn't see much momentum in the services for understanding the science behind military decision-making.

"In the military, momentum means funding. If you're going to get funding to investigate these types of things, you have to get the attention of someone very high up in the chain of command or of someone in the [Senior Executive Service] who's going to continually press for it. It's not something that's arranged overnight," Zimm says.

"In any budget situation, there are many more demands than there are funds. So you have to apply money to where the perception is that the need is the greatest. And right now, the perception is the need is the greatest on the hardware side," he says. "We haven't run into too many situations where the human interface was the problem, and even when we have, it's very simple to come back and say it was 'human error' rather than recognize the system contributed to enforcing that human error."

From Data to Knowledge

The Pentagon's vision of the future can be found in "Joint Vision 2010," a blueprint for how military leaders believe the services will operate by the end of the next decade. The document focuses heavily on how technology will shape conflicts by providing commanders with faster, more accurate information.

"Information technology will improve the ability to see, prioritize, assign and assess information," the document says. "The fusion of all-source intelligence with the fluid integration of sensors, platforms, command organizations, and logistic support centers will allow a greater number of operational tasks to be accomplished faster. Advances in computer processing, precise global positioning, and telecommunications will provide the capability to determine accurate locations of friendly and enemy forces, as well as to collect, process, and distribute relevant data to thousands of locations."

The result, according to the document, will be "dominant battle space awareness," enabling U.S. forces to see the battlefield and the array of friendly and enemy troops with greater clarity.

In the Army, this vision is being achieved largely through the service's digitization experiments, whereby technology enables troops to pinpoint their location on the battlefield, the location of other friendly troops and the location of the enemy. The data is fed through a network of sensors communicating across platforms in the battle space. With the improved "situational awareness" engendered by digitization, troops will be able to fight more effectively, accomplishing missions faster with fewer casualties, Army leaders say.

But providing more data to soldiers in and of itself is not sufficient, says Col. Nathan Noyes, director of the Digital Force Coordination Cell at Fort Hood, Texas.

"Simply getting more data to people doesn't do you any good. As a matter of fact, it makes matters worse often. You have to take that data, turn it into information, and take that information and turn it into knowledge," he says.

For data to be useful, soldiers must be able to interpret it quickly, at a glance, he says. Noyes uses a driving analogy to make his point: "Let's say you're driving down the highway. Suddenly you notice in front of you a yellow light. You don't have a clue how long that light's been yellow, what the condition of your car is, what the stopping distance is between you and the intersection.

"Simply telling you how thick your break pads are, the last time your oil was checked, how fast you're going, what the temperature of the road surface is-which is all good data-doesn't do you any good. In fact, I've made your life more complicated," Noyes says.

"But if I could do something like take that yellow light and put gradients in it, so that not only could you see that it's yellow, but see how long it's been yellow, and if I could take all of the data I just gave you and could roll it into an indicator that said, 'Yes, you can stop in the amount of distance you have left,' 'You might be able to stop,' or 'There's no way you're going to be able to stop before the intersection,' then based on those two at-a-glance cues, you can make that decision.

"You've now moved from data to information to understanding," he says.

The Army is applying the same principles to combat operations, with great effect, Noyes says.

Seeing Is Believing

Five years ago, an Army tank scout on a mission would typically spend 60 percent of his time with his finger on a map trying to keep track of where he was and another 10 percent of his time trying to make sure he knew where the other tanks in his unit were, says Noyes.

"That leaves you maybe 20 to 30 percent of your time to actually look for the enemy and look at the terrain and keep your weapon system oriented. Normally, when you're in that kind of situation, the good guys and bad guys bump into each other," he says. "And then it's a frantic effort-you throw your map in the air, you grab your weapon system, you fire a couple rounds at the guy to suppress him, and you deploy to cover-that is your driver immediately gets behind a big rock or hill or something, and then you have to detect, identify, locate, report and all that good stuff.

"But what you really do is you go 'Wow. I'm here. Now where'd I throw my map?' You find your map, pull it out and go, 'OK, if I'm here, [the enemy's] probably here,' and you pick up your radio and you call for artillery," Noyes says. "It takes you a few adjustments to get the artillery where you need it and then you're ready to come out from behind the hill. You've got to search, find him again, and hopefully you'll kill him before he kills you."

Based on Army training data, that sequence of events would typically take about 20 minutes, Noyes says. But with the technology the Army is experimenting with now in the digitization program, that sequence can be compressed dramatically.

"At a glance, [a soldier] can look down at his screen and see and understand not only where he is, but where he is in relation to where he ought to be. He can also glance down and see where his buddy is and what his buddy is doing-he can tell if he's got his weapon systems on, if he's oriented, that kind of stuff," Noyes says. "What used to take him 60 percent of his time, now takes less than 10 percent. Also, from a glance, he can look down and see where the bad guys are [based on] the last reports made.

"What you find is rarely do we bump into the bad guys anymore. We almost always find them first," Noyes says. Once the enemy is detected, the enemy's location is recorded to within 10 meters using laser technology. With a few keystrokes, the soldier can then feed that information into the network that depicts the battlefield for all U.S. forces in the theater.

"When you watch these guys maneuver with the new system, it's absolutely amazing. They do things faster, much more accurate, much more lethal than anything we've had before," Noyes says. "Where [it looks as if] we're throwing a lot more data at people we're really not throwing data. We've taken the data, turned it into information, then into understanding. That's where digitization is making the significant difference for us. It's not that I'm giving a guy a whole bunch of more information. I'm giving him synthesized understanding. He understands the intent of what I want him to do and he's much faster and lethal at doing it."

Learning Curve

Since the Army began experimenting with digitization in 1994, researchers have learned that how information is conveyed is as important as what information is conveyed, says Terry Edwards, technical director at the digitization program's Central Technical Support facility at Fort Hood.

In an exercise designed to test how technologies that improve situational awareness on the battlefield could support mission commanders, two things quickly became evident. First, the Army needed to develop a joint database to integrate data from different systems and make it useful for commanders. For instance, staff officers had to be able to synchronize data arriving through intelligence and logistics channels with data arriving through combat system channels. Second, the information needed to be displayed on large screens at the battlefield headquarters. "We looked at how information flowed on the battlefield, how much information was available in the TOC [tactical operations center] at any given time, and how the soldier wanted the information given to him. There were a lot of lessons learned," Edwards says.

"Commanders made decisions on visually seeing how things are presented," Edwards says. "It was important not only how we packaged the information, but how we presented it to the commander. Big screen displays became very important."

Through ongoing experimentation, the Army is continually gaining a better understanding of what needs to be done in terms of collecting, manipulating and packaging data to make it useful on the battlefield, Edwards says. In addition, there is a significant learning curve for soldiers in the Fort Hood-based 4th Infantry Division, the test bed for digitization. Soldiers have to develop a higher-than-average level of computer literacy to use and maintain their systems effectively.

"There's constant training," says Edwards. "That's a constant struggle. One of the big things the Army has to deal with is the maintenance of this infrastructure. If you look at the infrastructure that we put into the tactical operations center, it is more complicated than anything you would have in a regular office environment."

Developing computer literacy and maintaining hardware are only part of the challenge in priming troops for an information-rich environment, however. Like the Army, the Marine Corps has been experimenting with technology to improve situational awareness on the battlefield. And for a couple of years now, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va., has been exploring ways to train troops at the squad-leader level to quickly sift through large amounts of data to make rapid tactical decisions under stress.

The research evolved into what has become known as the Combat Decision Range, a computer simulation program designed to hone decision-making skills in military operations. The range can be tailored for training in various environments, from peacekeeping to combat, says Capt. Mark Sullo, project officer for the range.

With the simulator, a Marine has about 30 minutes to make between 50 and 60 tactical decisions covering everything from what gear he selects for a mission to whether or not he can fire at a sniper without violating the rules of engagement for a particular mission. "They come out of the CDR just sweating," says Sullo. Immediately following the range training, Marines are then debriefed on the decisions they made, why they made them and whether they were the right decisions.

"Ninety-eight percent of the feedback we've had has been very positive," says Sullo. The range has been well-received largely because there is a recognized need for such training, he says.

Do young Marines find themselves initially overwhelmed by the increasing levels of information flowing to the field? "I definitely think so," Sullo says. "Obviously, information flow is increasing. As communications have improved, the more information that is flowing to the platoon commander level, the more things he's going to have to juggle in the air."

Sullo likens a Marine trying to handle increasing amounts of information to that of a juggler with 10 balls, four of which are rubber and six of which are glass. "I can let the rubber balls hit the floor, but the glass ones I don't ever want to break." Of course, the trick is knowing which is which when they're all in the air.