Game-Based Experimentation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness

The Naval War College (NWC) through its Warfare Analysis and Research Department (WARD)-is pursuing a program of research into designing militarily relevant and scientifically valid experiments to investigate shared situational awareness (SSA) in the evolving environment of U.S. Joint command and control (C2). One aspect of this research builds on the foundation of reproducible results obtained from CNA's prior work in the field of measuring SSA in a wargaming environment. This research memorandum documents the support CNA provided to the NWC-WARD for an experiment conducted in the spring of 2002. This experiment took the form of a series of games played by teams from the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Naval War College. The test-bed was the internet-based game SCUDHunt, developed earlier by CNA and ThoughtLink Inc. for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA). In this simple yet elegant game, players take the roles of sensor asset managers and attempt to deploy their sensors to search a small, gridded map for hidden "SCUD" launchers. Each sensor has different characteristics of coverage and reliability. To play effectively, the players must work together, sharing information and developing their shared situational awareness in order to find the SCUDs and make accurate strike recommendations.