HUMAN DECISIONS IN COMMAND CONTROL CENTERS

Men have been designing command control systems for as long as they have found it necessary to combine for the accomplishment of almost any mission, military or otherwise. As soon as a structure was established for the giving and taking of orders and for the transmission of information in a more or less systematic way between members of even the most rudimentary organization, the essentials of a command control system had emerged. As long as the tasks to be performed remained relatively uncomplicated, the time available for their completion relatively great, the risks associated with failure relatively low, and the size of the group relatively small, the formal relations among the elements of the organization in question could remain comparatively few and simple. Technological advances have made the missions and tasks more complex, but they have concurrently provided the means for operating under more complex rules in a more demanding world. While it is necessary to recognize the capability provided by modern techniques, i t is important to avoid being misled by the complexity and magnitude of automated and semiautomated systems into regarding the problems as entirely new. Basically, they are elaborations of former problems, newly emphasized by the new environment. The modern problem of command is distinguished from earlier ones by the rate a t which information must be handled and decisions made. This distinction may be clarified by dividing the problem into its two readily observable aspects: (1) complexity and (2) urgency. (While the ensuing discussion describes the military case, analogies in the commercial, industrial, and governmental fields are not hard to find.) (1) That a given decision both involves more data and implies more consequences than it used to follows from the increased scope of the “battlefield,” the greater range and effectiveness of weapons, the greater variety of alternative actions available, the larger amount of mobility both possible and desirable, the increased interdependence among line, staff, and support activities, and improved methods of prediction and planning. (2) The increased urgency for proper decisions results from the reduced time required for weapon delivery, the magnitude of available destructive effect, the irreversibility of commitments, and the possible suddenness of onset of the conflict state. Command decisions depend (hopefully) upon data either currently supplied or stored. This paper attempts to describe the classes of decision required in command, which may be thought of as the process of achieving desired object ive5 through selective commitment of available rebource?. Command centers are typically nodes in networks constituting command control systems. The notion of a “center” must not be misinterpreted as implying centralization of decision. I t simply indicates a place where some