Speed has always been critical in warfare, and the pace of battle is moving faster than ever before. Hybrid warfare involves responding to a range of factors in multiple domains. There is simply too much information for any single individual to take in and then rapidly make the best possible decision. But with a Digital Targeting Web, and other software innovations, we can reduce the cognitive burden for decision-makers, giving them the chance to gain and maintain the initiative and dominate the tempo of battle.
Cognitive burden is not just a challenge for decision-makers in headquarters. It exists all the way through the chain of command. It is a workload placed on soldiers, commanders, and operators during tasks in the field. They undergo serious operational stress and time constraints that can undermine their ability to reach the decision needed to achieve their objective successfully. For example, they can suffer from information overload, stress and fatigue, and extreme time pressure.
This leads to a reduction in situational awareness, slower or impaired decision-making, increased likelihood of error, and decreased performances and mission effectiveness. Failure to make the right decision – and quickly – gives an edge to our adversaries with lethal consequences. Enemy forces are testing and running new software capabilities to give themselves the upper hand. Collaborative efforts within the Sceptre ecosystem are focused on finding solutions to keep British and allied forces multiple steps ahead.
The key is to reduce the cognitive load. Sceptre is addressing this by harnessing emerging technologies that deliver contextual display based on role, location, and relevance across multiple domains. Filtered feeds only provide what users need to know instead of bombarding them with information they don’t need. This includes the ability to stream only the relevant data to clients based on the policies they set, dynamically adapting as the situation evolves.
In modern operations, British and allied forces increasingly rely on technology and cyber operations. Multi-domain warfare inevitably intensifies cognitive demand. But we can share the cognitive burden by balancing automation and human decision-making to avoid overload and over-reliance on systems.
In fact, as we build the hybrid forces called for in the Strategic Defence Review, Sceptre and its network of British SMEs will have to focus on how to properly integrate manned and unmanned systems. This creates opportunities as well as challenges for lowering the cognitive burden for people serving in the forces.
What does this mean in practice? Through the capabilities being delivered by Sceptre partners, forces will be able to cut down noise and, in turn, reduce the cognitive burden. This will allow decision-makers to focus on the surface, reaching more accurate decisions as fast as possible. Optimising system performance can then support hard real-time interoperability. As a result, we can achieve genuine networked decision superiority. In a potential peer conflict, Britain and its allies will need to grab any advantage it can to out-think and out-decide the enemy.
By driving a next-generation C2 technology stack and harnessing the best of British innovation, Sceptre is ensuring that advantage remains firmly on our side, proving that, together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.