Self-Assessment of Command Performance and Feedback in Multiforce Training

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of multiforce (multiservice, joint service, and multinational) operations highlights the need to better understand how to train and evaluate multiforce command staffs, especially for the planning phases of combat and peacekeeping operations at high echelons. Here the “dynamics of human interaction that constitute the essence of command” (Foster, 1988, p. 204) pose the most severe challenge to training Assessment of how well these dynamics are being shaped in training exercises poses an especially difficult and complex problem. In assessing combat planning, we have neither the structure (for example, standard operating procedures, software, and equipment) nor the hard data (for example, casualties and objectives reached) that are available in the execution phases of combat. Yet to effectively train people in combat planning skills, we need to link those skills to explicit training objectives, measure how well the skilss are performed, and use the measurement results to provide trainin feedback. Even more challenging is training for peacekeeping operations and assessing the human dynamics involved. Peacekeeping tasks and outcomes are less structured, more uncertain, and less well defined—and therefore more difficult to observe and measure—than combat tasks. Peacekeepers must plan operations involving a complex mixture of social, economic, and political tasks as well as supporting police or combat tasks. We need to find innovative ways to assess the skills and performance of there difficult‐to‐observe tasks.