Land Ahoy! Understanding Submarine Command and Control During the Completion of Inshore Operations

The aim of this study was to use multiple command teams to provide empirical evidence for understanding communication flow, information pertinence, and tasks undertaken in a submarine control room when completing higher- and lower-demand inshore operation (INSO) scenarios.

The focus of submarine operations has changed, and submarines are increasingly required to operate in costal littoral zones. However, submarine command team performance during INSO is not well understood, particularly from a sociotechnical systems perspective.

A submarine control-room simulator was built. The creation of networked workstations allowed a team of nine operators to perform tasks completed by submarine command teams during INSO. The Event Analysis of Systematic Teamwork method was used to model the social, task, and information networks and to describe command team performance. Ten teams were recruited for the study, affording statistical comparisons of how command-team roles and level of demand affected performance.

Results indicated that the submarine command-team members are required to rapidly integrate sonar and visual data as the periscope is used, periodically, in a "duck-and-run" fashion, to maintain covertness. The fusion of such information is primarily completed by the operations officer (OPSO), with this operator experiencing significantly greater demand than any other operator.

The OPSO was a bottleneck in the command team when completing INSO, experiencing similar load in both scenarios, suggesting that the command team may benefit from data synthesis tasks being more evenly distributed within the command team.

The work can inform future control-room design and command-team ways of working by identifying bottlenecks in terms of information and task flow between operators.