The Impact of a Response Management Tool on Air Warfare Tactical Decision Making

Abstract

Responding appropriately to multiple, fast evolving, high risk situations is difficult. We investigated the design of a decision support tool called a Response Manager within the context of naval air warfare. Our question was whether support, in the form of presenting response options for consideration, should be generic to all aircraft or specifically tailored to different types of aircraft. Specifically tailored options limit clutter on a display, but perhaps at the price of constraining options and decision making to an inappropriately small set. In our experiment, air warfare-trained naval officers saw snapshots of air warfare situations consisting of a map of an airspace, detailed data about one aircraft, plus a set of response options. We varied the contents of the response sets. The results indicate that participants tended to give orders to execute responses that were congruent with the presented response set. Highly experienced officers showed as large an influence of response set presentation as did less experienced officers. Separate threat assessment ratings, however, indicated that the specifically tailored response sets were not influencing threat assessments; they were influencing response selection only. We concluded that the response manager works more like a memory aid, by orienting attention toward the presented response options, rather than by biasing situation interpretations.