Information Dominance in Military Decision Making

This study considers how commanders exploit the ABCS (Army Battle Command System) to achieve information dominance (ID) on today's conventional battlefield. The work examines how ABCS is used by commanders and staffs to achieve information dominance at the brigade and battalion levels. Further, it examines how ABCS systems affect decision making. A review of recent trends at the Combat Training Centers (CTCs) indicates that advantages are gained by the using ABCS and situational awareness at the brigade and battalion level is achieved. The findings indicate that intuition and inhibition do affect the use of ABCS. The study determined that technologies like ABCS are the first step towards producing future digitized systems that will gain ID for the future commander. The research suggests the continued development ID technologies that enable a better decision making. The data was gathered from the Center for Army Lessons Learned, CTC files-- specifically, the digital rotations. Finally, with the expanded battle space, it identifies the problem that brigades do not have the weapons systems to influence this battle space, hence the current failures at the CTCs today.