Toolkit for Evaluating Mission Performance and Effectiveness of Small Teams (TEMPEST)

Military operations are complex, multi-faceted actions requiring continuous, acute awareness of the battlespace, emerging threats, and blue force status. Order generation and distribution are well-defined tasks within the Mission Command (MC) cycle, benefiting from decades of experience captured in frequent doctrine refinements. However, best practices for observing actions and interpreting effects have not kept pace with advances in computing resources available to todays Commanders. As a result, while assessments are performed and lessons learned are captured, these often fail to occur within operationally meaningful timeframes, delaying recognition and application of critical context useful for the re-planning process. To modernize this process and keep pace with current operational tempos, we propose to design and demonstrate a Toolkit for Evaluating Mission Performance and Effectiveness of Small Teams (TEMPEST). TEMPEST will provide end-to-end evaluation support via three key components: (1) a library of metrics that provide action-indication exemplars to rapidly select mission-specific indicators that can effectively be used for evaluation; (2) intuitive authoring tools for both customizing and developing metrics for evolving mission and MC scenarios and capabilities; and (3) an Automated Document Parser that leverages existing mission status report documentation to automatically monitor and provide status updates on relevant metrics.