Trade-offs Between Command and Control Architectures and Force Capabilities Using Battlespace Awareness

Information age organizations must effectively utilize new communications capabilities to gain an advantage over their competition. Command and Control (C2) research has demonstrated the potential for decentralization of C2 to improve mission performance in networked battlefields. However, it is unlikely that all future missions will be best executed with a decentralized C2 architecture. Therefore, it is desirable to understand the trade-offs that exist between adopting various C2 architectures. This work investigated the interplay between C2 architectures employed by friendly and enemy forces with varied force capabilities and mission conditions. C2 architectures were decomposed into information sharing and decision authority networks, where nodes represented assets and directed links represented the flow of information or decisions. The topologies of these networks were varied to compare decentralized and centralized C2 architectures. An agent-based model was developed to simulate mission performance with varied C2 architectures, force capabilities, and mission conditions. Information entropy-based battlespace awareness was used to evaluate the performance of C2 architectures. Results showed trade-offs between C2 architectures depending on force capabilities (sensor radius), missions conditions (network reliability and jamming), and enemy C2 architectures. Results also suggested that future C2 studies consider information entropy-based battlespace awareness as a measure of C2 effectiveness.