Estimating Situational Awareness Parameters for Net Centric Warfare from Experiments

During the past decade the doctrine of Net Centric Warfare has emerged and grown. NCW has been defined as an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and degree of self -synchronization. (Alberts, Garstka, and Stein (2000)). Situational Awareness and its sharing by linked warfighters is thus deemed to be a major causative factor in increasing combat power. How do we create and measure situational awareness and relate it to combat? What are some of its determinants? We shall see in the results of the controlled warfighting experiment examined below that there are at least two major determinants of increased Situational Awareness for a warfighting team, viz. use of a relatively complete Common Operational Picture of the battlespace and time spent collaborating with this COP as a team.