Tactical Decision Making under Conditions of Uncertainty: An Empirical Study

Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of warfare. Military decision makers confront uncertainty when the data they encounter are incomplete (missing), ambiguous, or conflicting. This study examined how different categories of uncertainty (ambiguous/missing, conflicting, baseline) affect response time and type of decisions made in a low-fidelity tactical decision making task. Prior to the study, researchers elicited real-world tactical scenarios from veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom in which uncertainty was present. Nine scenarios were developed from the interviews and were given to 28 participants at the Command and General Staff College, FT Leavenworth, KS. Participants were asked to make a decision; their responses were recorded and analyzed. The results indicate that the category of uncertainty and scenario difficulty were significant factors in response time and type of decision made. These findings have the potential to improve human behavior modeling, tactical simulations, and representations of complex task environments.