ABSTRACT
Visualization technologies have been used to investigate difficult tactical, design, and analytic problems for many thousands of years, since the beginning of human history. This chapter discusses application of visualization to teach the incredibly complex tasks involved in antisubmarine warfare (ASW). In ASW, the main tasks are to search for, locate, identify, and if necessary confront or even attack possible opposing submarines while avoiding counterdetection or counterattack — clearly "high-stakes" problem solving. Interactive multisensor analysis training (IMAT) takes advantage of decades of development in a large number of university and Navy research laboratories to build computational physics-based models of the sources, sensors, and environment. IMAT includes extensive range-dependent propagation loss models and databases of environmental data approved by the Oceanographer of the Navy. Target motion analysis (TMA) is the process of determining distance, course, and speed of an opposing ship. Transmission loss and TMA, as difficult as they are, are merely a few of the more fundamental topics in ASW.
