Conduct and assessment of A2C2 experiment 3 and guidelines for future experimentation

Abstract

The Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) project is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and is focused on analysis of joint decision-making at the operational level and adaptation of joint command and control architectures. To accomplish this objective, the A2C2 project team has conducted a series of human-in-the-loop experiments at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). The third experiment of the series was conducted during November 1997. This experiment differed from previous A2C2 experiments in that it focused on how organizations adapt their structures to maximize their effectiveness under changing events. This thesis reports on the planning and conduct of Experiment 3 with a focus on the contributions made by author and the Lead Team of officer-students and the analysis of their hypotheses. The author examines data collected during Experiment 3 in support of these hypotheses. A detailed statistical analysis is performed and results discussed. Finally, a discussion of lessons learned from the author's perspective pertaining to the experiment is given along with recommendations for conducting future experiments at NPS.