ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the military tactical command treat decision making as a problem solving process. Experts have large collections of schemas, enabling them to recognise a large number of situations as familiar. Experienced decision makers can quickly and accurately achieve situation awareness in critical situations due to their large knowledge base of tactical patterns. Studying such cases from different angles and acknowledging the relevance of cues and their intercontingencies help students in the build-up of mental tactical patterns. The US Marines adopted a low fidelity training technique to present tactical problems to trainees Tactical Decision Games (TDGs). The TDGs have been used successfully to present a wide variety of relevant tactical situations to trainees, and to enable them to practise situation assessment and tactical decision making. In a training setting, the nature and difficulty of live and simulation exercises can be controlled, thus enabling the delivery of training tailored to identify training needs.
