The Advanced Technologies to aid Commander Decision Making capability aims to enhance decision-making (DM) for Commander Carrier Strike Group (CCSG); empower commanders via a suite of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agents designed to facilitate warfighting cognition and mitigate blind spots; accelerate information flow and analysis moving the decision-making timeline to the left to allow more decision space to avoid potentially morally challenging or costly dilemmas; and increase overall speed and quality of command decision making, promoting decision superiority in the face of complex operational challenges, ultimately improving the effectiveness of CSG operations, and out-thinking adversaries.
Research Concentration Areas
Develop a human-centric approach to modeling CCSG decision-making and AI/ML decision-making tools and user interfaces for maximally optimizing CCSG DM.
Conduct a top-down analysis of CCSG decision making processes and assess cognitive blind spots and other factors that influence decisions. Use the analysis to model the decision-making process for a Carrier Strike Group Commander. Identify operationally impactful Commander decisions to guide AI/ML tool development.
Explore AI/ML tools to address decision making challenges identified through the analysis of Commanders and CCSG decisions that can help improve CCSG decision processes, allowing for more effective and efficient decisions. Develop interactive interfaces to reduce biases/cognitive blind spots to optimize decision making.
Research Challenges and Opportunities
Model the Commander's Cognitive Space: Conduct foundational research to deeply understand and model the commander's decision-making process. This includes identifying critical decision points, mapping information requirements, uncovering cognitive biases, and understanding the impact of adversarial AI on the decision environment.
Develop Intelligent Data Fusion and Presentation: Create advanced techniques to aggregate, fuse, and analyze data from disparate active and passive feeds, intelligently bridging gaps in information. The core challenge is to develop intuitive, interactive interfaces that distill this data into actionable intelligence, presenting it at the right time and in the right context to enhance, not overload, the decision-maker.
Engineer a Unified AI Advisory System: Build and prototype a suite of specialized AI agents tailored for specific warfighting domains (e.g., Surface Warfare). A central AI orchestrator will then be developed to synchronize these agents, providing the commander with a single, holistic view of the decision space and enabling standardized measurement and acceleration of the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop.
How to Submit
For detailed application and submission information for this research topic, please refer to our broad agency announcement (BAA) No. N0001425SB001.
Contracts: All white papers and full proposals for contracts must be submitted through the ONR Submission Portal; instructions are included in the BAA.
Grants: All white papers for grants must be submitted through the ONR Submission Portal, and full proposals for grants must be submitted through grants.gov; instructions are included in the BAA.