Future Technology Support of Command and Control Assessing the impact of assumed future technologies on cooperative command and control

Sammanfattning: In response to technological advances, especially in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), the so called revolution in military affairs (RMA) and later the concept of network-centric warfare (NCW) emerged as a theory to further utilize technology for military command and control (C2). Advocates of the Swedish ROLF 2010-vision and the concept of NCW have made claims and assumptions that future technology will improve mission effectiveness by, for example, increasing the understanding of a current situation and its development, the speed of command, and providing means to utilize more efficient forms of organizations. The scope of this thesis is to critically dissect and assess some of these claims and assumptions.Four papers are included: (1) An observational study involving military officers participating in a training session at the Swedish National Defence College’s command and control laboratory. (2) A study performed with a microworld is presented with a discussion considering using microworlds as a tool for investigating the effects of introducing characteristics of novel tech- nology. (3) An experimental study introducing a method to measure individual’s apprehension and assessed development of a situation. (4) Finally, an experiment is presented addressing assumptions of the efficiency of different C2 architectures and effects of graphical support for communication of intentions.The overall conclusion is that the strong benefits from implementing new technologies can be questioned. Results from the qualitative observations indicate that traditional working practices are used regardless introduction of technology with future characteristics. The results show that the strong positive effect that networked and technology enhanced C2 architecture was expected to have generally could not be demonstrated experimentally. However, it appeared that such a C2 architecture can provide some advantages of C2 performance over traditional counterparts under conditions of moderate complexity. Under situations of high complexity, neither the networked nor the traditional C2 architecture performed better than the control condition who lacked C2 capabilities.