Evidence of Naturalistic Decision Making in Military Command and Control

For the past 4 years, The UK Defence Research Agency (DRA)-Fort Halstead has been conducting research into various aspects of Command and Control (C²) decision making, examining how decision strategies are implemented by C² staff in a number of controlled simulated environments. One major study (Henderson, Pascual, & Fernall, 1993) involved a comprehensive survey of existing models of human decision making and potential impacting variables, to identify requirements for future research relating to C² decision making and assessment. That work, together with observations from previous exercises, provided the foundation for the empirical study reported here.