13th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS), June 17-19, 2008, Seattle, WA.The U.S. Navy is developing new maritime strategies and command structures to guide transformation efforts, to ensure the security of the global maritime commons in the new network-centric era, and to fit the challenges of the 21st century. The addition of an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) commander is one such innovative structural innovation that is under consideration. To empirically investigate different conceptualizations of ISR officers, we contrasted an ISR officer who coordinated--but did not own—ISR assets with an officer that coordinated—and owned—all ISR assets under low and high intensity mission conditions. Four teams comprised of three active duty officers were assigned to coordination or command ISR conditions and participated in two 90 minute experimental sessions using the Distributed Dynamic Decision-making simulator. The findings show that when task intensity was high the percentage of tasks correctly processed was higher when the ISR officer was a commander than a coordinator. We also found attack accuracy to be higher and action latency lower when mission intensity was high and the ISR officer was a commander. Implications for command and control organizations are discussed
