Collaborative Decision Making in Network-Centric Military Operations

Abstract

Proponents of network-centric warfare have espoused the notion that the continuing expansion of military networks will engender concomitant increases in the efficiency of collaborative military decision making. They suggest that network-centric information architectures will increase the ease with which decision quality information can be explicitly shared, and will also lead to self-synchronized action based on the shared situational model supported by the network. The paper takes a multidisciplinary look at the problem of collaborative decision making in military operations. The authors come primarily from research laboratory research and engineering backgrounds, but among them also number a professional air battle manager with significant experience in collaborative decision making in tactical and operational environments and a military psychologist required to deal with the training and selection issues posed by network-centric operations.