Despite the rapid rise in technological aids and decision support tools to assist with command and control activities, war-gaming remains a difficult and artful process for command teams to perform. War-gaming, a critical stage in the military decision-making process (MDMP), is a collective activity where command staff representing multiple warfighting functions step through one or more courses of action (COAs) in detail. By considering actions, reactions, and counteractions for each critical event of a COA, the command staff gain an understanding of the decision points, possible coordination problems, feasibility, risks, benefits, likelihood of success, and impact on campaign outcomes. Although there are prescribed MDMP methods and outputs, the art of effective war-gaming lies in achieving sufficient team coordination across the command staff to adequately appraise a COA and anticipate synchronization that will be needed for execution, all within the time constraints available for analysis. Consequently, an effective approach to training war-gaming ideally involves opportunities for staff to engage in realistic and challenging exercises where they can receive performance assessment and feedback via measures grounded in established constructs for team proficiencies. This paper presents a synthesis of constructs and findings on command team training that are pertinent to the construction of war-gaming exercises. Specifically, a foundation for general principles of teamwork has been established in the literature, and there have also been studies identifying determinants of war-gaming effectiveness tied to declarative measures intended for assessment by human instructors or subject matter experts. In order to build on existing research and apply it in an intelligent tutor, these measures and teamwork constructs are synthesized in a model tailored to war-gaming performance assessment and feedback for simulation-based team training. Outcomes of this effort will contribute to the development of a prototype for collective training of Army command groups.
Measures for Assessing Command Staff Team Performance in War-gaming Training
Conference
I/ITSEC 2021
Track
Human Performance Analysis and Engineering
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