The Australian Department of Defence has long sought to achieve a clear margin of military superiority against any credible adversary through manipulating advanced military technology. In recent years, networkcentric warfare has appeared to offer a range of operational advantages to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) through the process of linking sensors to shooters across the battlespace. These advantages include the creation of a robustly networked force that improves information-sharing, facilitates shared situational awareness and enables synchronisation of military effort in the pursuit of mission effectiveness. Ultimately, it will be the ability of all ADF elements in the battlespace to collaborate and to synchronise their efforts that will make or break future networked military capabilities.
While the Australian capability development community appreciates many of the technical challenges involved in the implementation of network-centric warfare in the ADF, there is much less appreciation of the human dilemmas that networking will create. We need a broader and more sophisticated understanding of what kind of machine–human interface networked systems will require in the years ahead. Although the ADF Network-centric Warfare Roadmap outlined in early 2003 considers aspects of the human dimension, these aspects concentrate mainly on doctrine, education and training issues, and largely ignore the human problems involved in successful system design. This article addresses the problem of the human–technical interface in system design by examining the challenges of a naturalistic environment; evolutionary acquisition; situational awareness; mission command and distributed decision-making; and information overload, cyber attack and human engineering.
The Challenge of Network-Centric Warfare in a Naturalistic Environment
The Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, has stated that ‘the information age holds great opportunities for us, if we seek to harness its strengths and understand its weaknesses’. 1 One of these weaknesses is the lack of understanding by many command-and-control systems designers of the complexity of the human environment in which networked systems will have to operate. The human environment is a naturalistic environment and has been characterised by two writers, J. Orasanu and T. Connolly, as uncertain, unstructured and dynamic, with often shifting, ill-defined or competing goals. Human decision-making must confront time management, stress control, organisational impediments, multiple actors and different stakeholders.2
Command-and-control systems represent the heart of networked warfare. However, many of these systems use classical analytical decision-making paradigms as their principal design foundation. Such an approach reflects the influence of prescriptive methods of automated command decision-making. Unfortunately, a prescriptive situation cannot be easily transferred to the highly unstructured, dynamic decision-making of a naturalistic environment. A realistic approach to net-centricity requires a design that can accommodate the human environment by recognising that any software that is used will be shaped by its users and is not inanimate.
Evolutionary Acquisition in Network-Centric Warfare
The real test of a networked military will lie in its ability to link sensors and databases in order to provide military commanders with vital information that, in turn, enables the efficient direction of operations. The rapid rate of development in computing technologies dictates that the acquisition of network-centric warfare technologies needs to be different from that of capital equipment acquisition.
Procurement operatives have used the term evolutionary acquisition for a decade to describe computer system acquisition that is based on graduated development. Evolutionary acquisition involves the purchase of commercial, military or government off-the-shelf technologies and allows end-users to employ these systems for military purposes. Incremental adjustments in effectiveness are then made in consultation with those end-users. The benefit of evolutionary acquisition is that it allows advances in software technology to be adopted as they occur and with the demands of users in mind. In the future, evolutionary acquisition should proceed in a manner that carefully balances the requirements of both the individual and the team within the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) and conforms to new forms of system design and development.
The Technology - Human Interface and Military Situational Awareness
One of the underlying assumptions of net-centricity is that information-sharing can create common situational awareness. Advanced technology allows users to collect information from diverse locations through the use of sensors deployed on both manned and unmanned platforms. Modern communication networks permit military personnel to share a vast array of information on the dynamics of the battlespace in a distributed manner. Yet it is a mistake to view situational awareness as a phenomenon that is created by technology alone. Determining what situational awareness means requires an active cognitive process by military staffs—a process that transcends mere reliance on technology. The role of human agency is vital. For example, an Australian Army definition states that situational awareness is ‘the ability to interpret facts, information gaps and uncertainty in the battlespace in order to assist decision superiority’. 3
Unless military commanders and their staffs are actively engaged in the processing of information, they are unlikely to achieve the levels of situational awareness that create a ‘knowledge edge’ in warfare. A 1999 assessment of knowledge-based warfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina argues that ‘the poor or minimal use of available information and the lack of concern about knowledge-related deficiencies suggest that the key obstacle to all information, or knowledge-based military operations, is the brains of leaders’.4 Without intellectual involvement from military professionals, information that users receive may begin to resemble ‘dots on a screen’.
In emerging Australian military doctrine, military practitioners believe that situational awareness enables self-synchronisation by forces in the field, resulting in enhanced mission effectiveness. Yet, the sharing of information, particularly if it is distributed rather than collocated, does not automatically guarantee a common operating picture. As one US report on the subject notes, ‘the assumption that others will arrive at the same comprehension and projections based on the same input is often false, because each individual will interpret the information in the context of his own goals and mental models’. 5
A British study of teamwork and situational awareness suggests that:
Teams ... are likely to encounter difficulties in evolving and maintaining accurate and timely shared mental models for taskwork and teamwork. Communications, establishing and maintaining situation [sic] awareness, implementing core teamwork behaviours (monitoring, feedback and support), and leading teams effectively, were all challenging problem areas.6
While the development of a ‘Commonly Informed Operational Picture’ is a laudable aim, military practitioners must realise that ‘one picture’ may not suit all stakeholders involved in a particular operation.
The Doctrine of Mission Command and the Art of Distributed Decision-Making
The implementation of an effective Australian network-centric warfare capability may require changes to traditional military command-and-control procedures. In particular, military staffs will need to develop a devolved command-and-control concept that is suitable for use in flattened, less hierarchical organisational structures. If the notion of the ‘strategic corporal’—a soldier of relatively junior rank taking important tactical decisions—is to be realised, then the Australian military will need to encourage and refine the doctrine of mission command. In a mission command approach to military operations, subordinates are given a clear indication of a commander’s intent and are then allowed considerable freedom of action in executing decision-making.
The main features of network-centric warfare—including improved informationsharing, shared situational awareness, and synchronised activity—are compatible with mission command. Indeed, the adoption of networking by the ADF may result in mission command being given a new lease of life. However, because a net-centric approach confers on senior commanders the ability to micromanage a headquarters as well as to devolve responsibility within both it and the field, it remains to be seen whether mission command doctrine will prevail over tendencies towards greater centralised command and control.
Preventing Information Overload and Cyber Attack
Another area of networking that will require attention is the problem of information overload. Ultimately, it will be the ability of all ADF elements in the battlespace to use information gathered from networks to synchronise their common efforts that will make or break future networked capabilities. In this respect, the availability of vast amounts of information through computer networks raises serious concern about when is enough information enough? What General Cosgrove has called ‘information obesity syndrome’ and the danger of ‘paralysis by analysis’ may be the Achilles heel of networked forces. Commanders will have to demonstrate discipline, professional judgment and rigorous time management in overcoming this problem.7
One solution that has been advanced to overcome overload is the notion of an information ‘pull’, as opposed to ‘push’, philosophy. In a ‘pull’ philosophy, military professionals filter information, seizing on that which is operationally relevant, and ignoring that which is not. The ‘pull’ approach places a premium on skilful interpretation of information. Under combat conditions, when time is a critical commodity, it is clearly impractical to expect tactical commanders to simply ‘surf’ for information. Commanders will have to make judgments and decisions on the operational significance of information.
In some respects, the ‘push’ approach to the use of information may be more appropriate. In a ‘push’ approach, the analysis of information may require the development of a systems architecture in which commanders can determine which elements of incoming information need to be ‘pushed’ outwards. Different military echelons in a command-and-control structure will require varying amounts of information. As a result, a filtering of highly detailed data will probably become essential in networked military operations in order to prevent information overload.
Apart from information overload, there is also the risk of vulnerability of networks to cyber attack. Reliance on information supplied through networks carries with it the risk of attack by a sophisticated adversary in the form of cyber strikes against communication systems, using viruses and spamming as weapons. Countering cyber attacks may not only absorb a friendly force’s valuable time, but may also arouse suspicion that information may have been compromised, thus endangering operational security. From the outset, system design needs to be as robust as possible in order to minimise the vulnerability of a net-centric military system.
Human Engineering and System Design
Automation has generally been designed to replace human control and decision-making in complex systems for reasons of efficiency. Human systems engineering attempts to balance the capability roles of automation systems with the activities of humans. This view was outlined as early as 1951 by Paul Fitts in his work on human engineering. Fitts proposed that computers and humans should be allocated functions appropriate to their respective capabilities, with machines monitoring humans. 8
In the military realm, however, the relationship between computers and human beings reverses the monitoring role once envisaged by Fitts. In the quest for situational awareness, military professionals cannot be removed from decision loops. Active engagement by military actors is essential if the effectiveness of a networked system is to be ensured. In military operations, the requirement for automation within a networked system should be to facilitate human control over decision-making. Scientists must ensure that function allocation studies that focus on human factors are conducted on command-and-control systems.
The human–system interface is the place where the ‘rubber hits the road’ in network-centric warfare, and compatible software interfaces are a key factor in ensuring high military performance. Interface design must be optimised to suit human capacity since we have not reached the stage where, as in Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1969 science-fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the automated system (HAL) was so capable that it could outthink and outperform humans. 9
Conclusion
General Cosgrove has warned that the implementation of network-centric warfare in the future may threaten individual ‘rice bowls’ throughout the ADO. 10 Two of these ‘rice bowls’ may belong to the scientific acquisition and the software development communities, neither of whom may wish to expend the resources necessary to undertake the research work required to ensure that in systems design we meet the requirements of the human–network interface realistically and efficiently.
The Australian defence scientific community must ensure that capability developers are aware of potential pitfalls in the capacity of humans to interact effectively with advanced technology. If awareness of the vital interface between humans and computers is not emphasised within the ADF, then network-centric warfare may risk becoming a costly exercise and fraught with frustration. The ADF needs to undertake careful and detailed studies into the command-and-control compatibility between human operators and computer systems in networked operations.
Our research must concentrate on injecting the factor of a fallible humanity into the networking equation. In recent years, we have endured one expensive command-and-control system failure in the ADF, in the form of the Australian Army Automated Command and Control System (AUSTACCS). In the latter case, scientists did not sufficiently refine their research and development process. Australia’s defence science community must seek to ensure that a similar fate does not overcome Australia’s promising network-centric warfare initiative.
Endnotes
1 General Peter Cosgrove, ‘Racing Towards the Future: Reflections on Iraq, the Art of Command and Network-centric Warfare’, Australian Army Journal, December 2003, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 25–33.
2 J. Orasanu and T. Connolly, ‘The Reinvention of Decision-Making’, in G. Klein, R. Orasanu, R. Calderwood and C. E. Zsambok (eds), Decision-Making in Action: Models and Methods, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1993, pp. 3–20.
3 Australian Army, Land Warfare Doctrine, 0-1-5, Situational Awareness, Combined Arms Training and Development Centre, Puckapunyal, Vic., 2001, p. 1-4.
4 Lieutenant Colonel J. A. Gentry, ‘ Knowledge-Based Warfare: Lessons From Bosnia’, The Officer, vol. 75, no. 1, January–February 1999, p. 142.
5 M. R. Endsley et al., Modelling and Measuring Situation Awareness in the Infantry Operational Environment, Research Report 1753, US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Alexandria, VA, 2000, p. 56.
6 R. G. Pascual, M. C. Mills and C. Blendell, Supporting Distributed and Ad-hoc Team Interaction, Defence Experimental Research Agency CHS Report, Adelaide, 1999, p. 7.
7 Cosgrove, ‘Racing Towards the Future: Reflections on Iraq, the Art of Command and Network-centric Warfare’, p. 27.
8 See P. M. Fitts, Human Engineering for an Effective Air Navigation and Traffic Control System, National Research Council, Washington, DC, 1951.
9 The authors are grateful to Dr George Galanis of Land Operations Division, Defence Science and Technology Organisation, for the analogy from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
10 Cosgrove, ‘Racing Towards the Future: Reflections on Iraq, the Art of Command and Network-centric Warfare’, p. 32.
