Enhancing Tactical Decision-Making in Navy Seal Operations

Network centric warfare offers increased connectivity across echelons, enabling smaller, lighter units to behave with greater independence and respond faster to changing operational contexts. Nowhere is this capability more valuable than in Special Warfare, where small teams seek to move rapidly, flexibly, and decisively in response to unusual challenges. But while greater connectivity may enhance situational awareness and improve tactical decision making, it also threatens to impose information overload, and this danger is particularly critical for small teams operating on the battlefield. To address this problem, we propose to develop SWIFT (Special Warfare Information Funneling Toolkit), a collaborative capability enabling Navy SEAL teams to acquire, process, and share the information they need to collaborate in tactical decisions. To meet this goal, SWIFT will facilitate information delivery to Navy SEAL personnel by identifying, prioritizing, and mapping information needs onto available information sources. The fundamental challenge we will address in this project is the funneling of the right information to the right person at the right time, organized and presented in a cognitively friendly format that is (1) optimized for that person's roles and responsibilities; (2) accounts for that person's geographical location; and (3) fits the data communication, security, and user interface capabilities of the hardware device with which he is equipped.