MISSION EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS - EVALUATING AND IMPROVING TACTICAL MISSION PERFORMANCE IN HIGH-RISK, TIME-CRITICAL OPERATIONS

An unconditional necessity for effective emergency response, military missions, and other high-risk, tactical operations is that missions ar e supported by highly capable management. This implies the need for an omnidirectional, continuous flow of information, ranging from the chi ef executive level to the team-on-site levels, and that information me ets rigorous demands concerning reliability, availability and diagnost icity. Sometimes individual operators and sensor systems must without delay be allowed to affect decisions and actions of a senior commander . These requirements cannot be fulfilled unless new and innovative met hods, tools and technologies are developed to support comprehensive ev aluation and assessment of tactical operations. In this paper, we empl oyed a new technique of analysing team decision making and mission res ource management of units performing tactical emergency response missi ons. In a pilot study we investigated the performance of the mission e fficiency analysis (MEA) technique by analysing the rapid response cap abilities of tactical forces and tactical command teams The pilot stud y results indicated that the MEA technique supported this endeavour in an effective and evident manner. Using it in evaluating tactical situ ations will decisively impact on tactical performance and, hence, the outcome of tactical missions. Based on these results, we concluded tha t the MEA technique has the potential to be successfully implemented i n larger scale tactical exercises, and in evaluating actual high-risk, tactical operations as well. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right s reserved.