Tactical training specialists recognize the critical role that situation awareness (SA) plays in effective tactical performance in dynamic, high performance training environments. Yet assessing the role of SA in particular performance problems remains an elusive and primarily subjective process. Well documented and validated measurement tools such as SART and SAGATare effective discriminators of situation awareness in research, system design, training and other environments; however, their employment within a tactical training context typically requires either intrusive or delayed data collection. This paper proposes examining situation awareness from a training development standpoint in distributed mission operations (DMO) using decomposed mission essential competencies (MECs) as a framework. It explores the potential for developing tools to support the tactical trainer in assessing the role of situational awareness in observed performance. The paper briefly discusses two well known SA measurement techniques and moves to an examination of SA within the MEC framework for air combat and the application of a MEC decomposition process to identifying task SA requirements. The potential of modeling approaches to implement the MEC decompositions to organize the necessary data for cue development is explored. The discussion concludes by developing requirements for data collection in both individual and team SA estimation techniques employing local data sources as well as HLA and DIS network architectures within DMO.