ABSTRACT
By the end of the Second World War, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was becoming more and more aware that the accidents and operational difficulties involved with complex military systems (such as aircraft, ships, and armoured vehicles), often attributed to ‘human error’, were in fact the result of a complex interaction between the human operator, the design of the system, the procedures developed to employ the system, and the operating environment. The discipline and knowledge base of human factors engineering (HFE) was born, was nurtured within the military for a number of years, and eventually fledged to provide support to the design and development of non-military systems. The military, however, continued to define and refine the process by which the new discipline would be coordinated with other disciplines within the material acquisition process.
