RAA Liaison Letter 2024 - 2025 Edition

RAA Liaison Letter – 2024 / 2025 Edition 95 VIGILANCE DECREMENT: IMPROVING HUMAN PERFORMANCE TO DETECT & RESPOND TO THREATS Captain Christopher McCartney Instructor in Gunnery School of Artillery Thomas Jefferson once said “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” and the burden of vigilance falls heavily on air defence command post operators. Their ability to quickly recognise and respond to threats is crucial to defending the lives of our soldiers and achieving the mission. But modern operators have increasing difficulty maintaining focus. Social media, technology, rising rates of ADHD and the lingering effects of the pandemic have all reduced attentions spans 12 , increasing the risk that an operator may detect a threat too late. The importance of vigilance for air defenders will continue to rise, with hypersonic threats further reducing reaction time. Longer ranged and networked systems will place a larger area of responsibility into the hands of fewer individuals. However maintaining focus is not a new challenge, and it is worth looking back to history to enhance our ability to response to threats. It is not necessarily suggested that commander radio their operators during duty to provide a motivational speech but … Attention was first studied scientifically during WWII when radar and sonar operators found it challenging to maintain the focus required to detect the weak signals representing an enemy submarine or aircraft. Norman Mackworth was a British scientist recruited by the Royal Air Force to study this phenomenon and investigate ways to improve operator performance. He termed the problem “vigilance decrement”, which has results from the mental effort required to maintain focus. It has two components which degrade the longer an operator is on duty, reaction time (the time to react to a signal) and detection rate (ability to detect weak signals). 3 Mackworth simulated the display of a sweep of a radar display with a clock face which participants were tasked to observe for two hours. A singular clock hand ticked in small increments around the unmarked clock face and at irregular intervals would jump a larger than normal distance. Participants were asked to report each time they observed one of these signals. He found during the first 30 minutes participants missed 10-15 % of signals. After two hours however, they were missing up to 30%. Mackworth trialled various methods to improve performance and found that alternating the member on watch every 30 minutes produced better results, and after just a 30 minute break the participants performed almost as well as when they were fresh. Longer ranged and networked systems will place a larger area of responsibility into the hands of fewer individuals. He also found that when the participants were asked to perform a secondary task, answer a phone call at some point in their watch, they performed significantly worse. He suggested that the anticipation of listening for the phone call required additional mental effort which drew some of their focus away from the task. It is interesting to note that after the phone was received which instructed the participants to “do even better for the rest of the test” there was a significant boost to the participant’s performance.