Enhancing Tactical Decision-Making in Navy Seal Operations

Two clear trends in the U.S. military's ongoing transformation are the increasing reliance on Special Operations Forces for agile operations in the War on Terrorism and the revolution in networked information tools that can be deployed to the field. Harnessing the potential of these networked tools for Special Warfare requires the development of innovative collaboration tools that support the distributed, highly mobile, and mission-centric nature of Naval Special Warfare. Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE) has the scientific expertise and decision support development experience, coupled with access to expert military users, to integrate emerging cognitive science concepts in collaborative knowledge management into an innovative shared situation awareness and map-integrated messaging tool for Naval Special Warfare. This tool concept, which we call SLATE for Shared Lightweight Annotation TEchnology, focuses on two capabilities to enhance shared situation awareness and tactical decision-making: 1) contextualized, map-centric integration of new information for rapid comprehension and efficient communication, and 2) integrated message history for maintaining shared situation awareness across intermittent interruptions. SLATE addresses several critical technical challenges facing the Special Warfare environment such as time pressure, small screen real estate, and ultra-light network communications.