Decision making in complex naval command-and-control environments

This paper presents the findings of a study on how experienced naval officers make decisions in a complex, time-pressured command and control setting, the Combat Information Center of AEGIS cruisers. The decision processes invoked by the officers were consistent with the recognition-primed decision model. The majority of decisions concerned situation awareness and diagnosis in which the decision makers used feature-matching and story generation strategies to build situation awareness. Furthermore, awareness of the situation enabled the officers to recognize appropriate actions from published procedures or past experience. A recognitional strategy was used to identify 95% of the actions taken; decision makers compared multiple options in only 4% of the cases. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for framing command-and-control problems, for emphasizing situation awareness, for a descriptive model of decision making, and for designing decision supports.