A Research Agenda for Critiquing in Military Decision-Making

Supporting military decision makers is an important but difficult task. Providing correct and meaningful feedback on user input during the military planning process is especially difficult, given the characteristics of modern staff environments. In such environments, much work is performed simultaneously by domain experts who need to coordinate their efforts in joint operations. The products of the planning process, the orders, take the form of rough guidelines to subordinate units and are not intended for computer interpretation. We argue that there is a need for new approaches to much of what has traditionally been seen as decision support. In this paper, we discuss these difficulties in detail and outline a research agenda to address the most pressing issues at hand for decision support systems