Human Factors in Defence

Since its inception, just after the Second World War, human factors research has paid special attention to the issues surrounding human control of systems. Command and control environments continue to represent a challenging domain for human factors research. Modelling Command and Control takes a broad view of command and control research, to include C2 (command and control), C3 (command, control and communication), and C4 (command, control, communication and computers) as well as human supervisory control paradigms. The book presents case studies in diverse military applications (e.g. land, sea and air) of command and control. While the domains of application are very different, many of the challenges they face share interesting similarities.Modelling Command and Control will explore some of the differences and similarities in the land, sea and air domains. The book begins with an overview of human factors issues for command and control. These issues include theoretical and methodological developments, approaches to system and interface design, workload and situation awareness. The book places the role of humans as central and distinct from other aspects of the system. Therefore, although there is an over-arching conception of command and control 'systems', the focus of the book is to consider the peculiarities of the roles adopted by humans. There is a call for a socio-technical approach to the command and control research, by which both social and technical domains are treated with equal importance. This book demonstrates how the social and technical domains interact in the extensive case study material.