The Tactical Action Officer on board a U.S. Navy Cruiser, Destroyer, or Frigate is responsible for the operation of the entire watch team manning the ship's command center. Responsibilities include tactical decision making, console operation, communications, and oversight of a variety of watchstander responsibilities in air, surface, and subsurface warfare areas. Stottler Henke, in concert with Northrop Grumman, has developed the PORTS TAO ITS, an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for the instruction of Tactical Action Officers (TAOs) in training at the Surface Warfare Officers School (SWOS) using the PC-based Open-architecture Reconfigurable Training System (PORTS) as its basis.

This paper describes the instructional philosophy of the PORTS TAO ITS, resulting from close collaboration with SWOS instructors and Northrop Grumman's domain experts. The goal of the ITS is to train the student in `command by negation,' in which watchstanders perform their duties autonomously, while the TAO supervises, intervening in order to correct mistakes and rectify omissions. The TAO must know what responsibilities belong to each watchstander, how and in what circumstances those duties are performed, and how to communicate with watchstanders to request information, acknowledge reports, and order appropriate actions.

The ITS is designed to instill and assess mastery of these TAO abilities over the course of a series of exercises which present increasingly difficult problems. These include intentional mistakes of omission or commission by automated watch team role players. When TAO actions are expected, such as when these intentional mistakes are made, the ITS provides hints, prompts, and feedback to the student, which are also summarized at the end of each exercise with a detailed debrief. These interventions are sensitive to real-time changes in the student's mastery of a wide variety of principles, which are continually assessed.

There were several challenges and lessons learned from the implementation of this ITS and the related government acquisition process. These are also detailed in this paper.