Human Performance Essential to Battle Command: Report on Four Future Combat Systems Command and Control (FCS C2) Experiments

The Army's ongoing transformation to Future Combat Systems (FCS) requires an unprecedented alliance of humans and machines. Creating an alliance that actually improves, and does not impede, battle command is a human systems integration challenge for FCS and particularly the area of command and control (C2). To address that challenge, the FCS C2 program is investigating future battle command concepts at the small unit level. The FCS C2 effort, led by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Communications Electronics and Engineering Command (CECOM) with a focus on human performance by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), included a series of command-in-the-loop experiments from October 2001 to March 2003. This report summarizes research methods and findings on human performance across four iterative and exploratory FCS C2 experiments. The human performance findings reported are based on subjective measures and highly detailed objective measures of the command group's verbal and human-computer interactions. Overall, the results provide an emerging empirical database on the C2 functions and tasks required by an FCS command group in collaboration with prototype C2 systems. More problematic conclusions on workload and training are followed by more promising conclusions on user-based involvement and proactive research, and particularly their potential for solving workload and training problems.