Doing C2 (Command Control) Experiments Using War Games

In the last few years considerable progress has been made in the development of an analytic theory of military Command Control C2, both as a process and as a large-scale system. There are now models of C2 organizations which permit the examination of the effects of various changes in a C2 system and which can predict some of the behavior of such a system in a gross sense. And, due to the increased attention being given the field, with the attendant increase in papers, workshops, etcetera, there is slowly developing a common vocabulary for use in the emerging C2 Theory. What is still lacking, however, is a body of experimental data which can be used as a touchstone to guide further theoretical developments, and against which theoretical predictions can be tested. This paper reports the results of a very rudimentary experiment which was conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California, during the 1983 Winter Quarter to test two specific hypotheses. As is often the case, it was found necessary to modify or restate the hypotheses during the conduct of the experiment in order to accommodate certain real world constraints. The results, however, are both interesting in their own right and reassuring for the prospect of being able to do further experiments in the C2 arena.