Measuring the Impact of Situational Awareness on Digitised Force Effectiveness

The UK Command Interim Concept outlines agility, emphasising aspects such as responsiveness, adaptability, resilience and flexibility, as a key goal towards which the UK armed forces are heading over the next 20 years. It is expected that the introduction of digitised Communications and Information Systems (CIS) as part of a Network Enabled Capability (NEC) will be a key enabler for agility. To justify investment in these systems there is a need to demonstrate that CIS will result in an improvement in operational outcome and facilitate command agility. Previous operational analysis in support of CIS procurement has struggled to develop reliable and robust methods for quantifying the effects of CIS equipped forces on operational outcome. This study describes the development of a method for analytically assessing the benefits of CIS, through the development of appropriate measures of Situation Awareness (SA) based on the Endsley model. The study used a Command and Control (C2) based wargame and simulation model to assess the effect that SA has on operational outcome. Results show that the introduction of a digitised CIS does improve SA, and that improving SA has a strong positive correlation with improvements in force effectiveness.