EMBA · SKK GSB · Decision Making

AEGIS Command
Contact: Bandar Abbas

PERSIAN GULF · 1988

Based on a real incident reported by Kaempf, Wolf, Thordsen & Klein (1992) and analysed in Klein (1993, 2008). Designed for the EMBA programme at SKK GSB.

Two Iranian fighter jets have taken off and are flying a pattern your crew doesn’t recognise. You command the cruiser escorting an unarmed flagship. Every choice you make changes what happens next.

14 decisions

~60 min

9 animated scenes

3 reflections

Scored /28

The question

How should a commander decide when the evidence is ambiguous, the clock is running, and the rules allow more than one answer?

How it works

Watch the scenes, read the radar and listen to your crew. Each choice leads to its own consequences, and some open follow-up questions. The jets behave as they really did in 1988. If you fire, you will see what could have happened, lose 2 points, and then face the same decision again.

Scoring

Each of the 14 decisions scores +2 (strongest call), +1 (defensible but incomplete) or 0 (weakest call). The reasoning is explained after every decision and in the debrief. Firing on the jets costs 2 points. Follow-up questions are not scored.

Before you start

Allow about 60 minutes in one sitting: your answers are lost if you close or refresh the page. Turn your sound on. Some decisions show a countdown and your crew will push you as it runs down; it is there to add pressure, and you can still decide after it reaches zero. You can step back to review earlier decisions at any time.

MISSION BRIEFING — READ BEFORE PROCEEDING

What you need to know before assuming command

This briefing takes about 5 minutes. The key terms stay available during the simulation under the KEY TERMS tab.

THE SITUATION

The year is 1988. The Iran–Iraq War is in its eighth year. Tankers in the Persian Gulf are being attacked, and US warships escort shipping through the Gulf. The US is not at war with Iran.

You command a US Navy AEGIS cruiser escorting an unarmed flagship through the Gulf, in daylight. Your orders have two parts, and they can pull against each other: protect your ship and the flagship, and avoid an incident that widens the conflict. Your rules of engagement allow you to fire on any aircraft that commits a hostile act against your ship.

Every commander in the Gulf remembers USS Stark. In May 1987 an Iraqi jet fired two Exocet missiles into her, killing 37 sailors. Stark had radioed two warnings to the aircraft. She never fired a shot.

This scenario is based on a real incident studied by Gary Klein and colleagues. The events, their order and the real commander’s actions come from the published account. The crew, their words, the exact distances and some scenes are invented for the simulation. What the real commander did, and why, is revealed in the debrief.

WHO’S WHO — YOUR CREW

CO — Commanding officer

You, the captain. Every final decision is yours.

XO — Executive officer

Your second-in-command. Advises you and challenges your thinking. When the XO pushes back, that is normal and useful.

TAO — Tactical action officer

Runs the radar picture. First to report what the jets are doing.

WEPS — Weapons officer

Controls the ship’s missiles. Tells you when the rules allow firing, then waits for your order.

INTEL — Intelligence officer

Background on Iranian forces and how they usually behave.

RADIO

Messages from outside the room: the flagship’s commodore, headquarters, your electronic warfare officer.

YOUR TOOLS — TABS ABOVE THE CREW COMMS

SIGINT

Short for signals intelligence. Your analysts’ table of what the jets are doing, and whether each sign points toward or away from an attack.

Decision Matrix

Each option (fire, hold) set against each possibility (attack, intimidation), with the likely outcome in each case.

ROE Checker

Where things stand under your rules of engagement.

Notebook

Write down your working assessment at any point. Notes appear in the debrief.

The tools are optional and don’t affect your score.

KEY TERMS — PLAIN LANGUAGE

CIC

Combat information center: the darkened operations room where the crew tracks everything around the ship.

ROE

Rules of engagement: the rules that define when you may use force. Here, you may fire in self-defence if an aircraft commits a “hostile act”, such as locking its targeting radar onto your ship.

F-4 Phantom

An Iranian Air Force fighter jet that can carry missiles.

Orbit

Flying in circles around one spot instead of heading somewhere.

Search radar

Radar used to scan a wide area. A fighter’s radar sits in its nose and only looks forward.

Targeting lock

When a radar fixes on one target. It is the last step before a missile can be fired. Also called fire control radar or lock-on.

Breaking a lock

Using the ship’s electronic warfare system to jam a jet’s targeting radar so it loses its fix.

Chaff

Clouds of thin metal strips fired from a ship to confuse a missile’s radar and pull it off course.

MAD channel

The military air distress radio channel, used to warn aircraft.

Miles

Nautical miles (1.85 km). Bandar Abbas is about 40 miles away. A fighter covers 15 miles in about two minutes.

WHY THIS CASE MATTERS

Gary Klein spent years studying how experts decide under pressure: military commanders, firefighters, nurses, pilots. What he found surprised the field. Make the decisions as you would make them. The debrief shows what Klein found, and how your reasoning compares.

MISSION DEBRIEF

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Your name (shown on your PDF)

Save as PDF opens your browser’s print window: choose Save as PDF as the destination. Copy my results copies a text summary you can paste into an email or document.

THE SHIP YOU COMMANDED

The cruiser was USS Vincennes.

Klein’s report identifies her as the ship in this incident (Klein, 1993, p. 73). Her crew read two circling fighters correctly, held fire through repeated lock-ons, and sent them home without a shot.

Several months later, on 3 July 1988, in the middle of a gun battle with Iranian boats, Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner that had taken off from the same airport, Bandar Abbas. All 290 people on board were killed. Crew members reported the aircraft descending toward the ship; the ship’s own data show it was climbing the whole time.

Klein argues the cause was less about crew bias than about design: altitude appeared only as a small number on a side screen with no trend shown, and reading a trend took 5–10 seconds of staring at a changing number (Klein, 1993, pp. 72–76). After the shoot-down, the Navy funded the research programme that produced much of naturalistic decision making (Klein, 2008).

Discuss: The same ship, in the same waters, facing the same kind of decision, reached opposite outcomes. What was different? What does that say about the limits of expertise, and about the information experts are given?

Your decisions vs. the real commander

Klein’s seven claims — and how you did on each

Klein (1993, Table 3) summarised naturalistic decision making in seven claims. Each was tested by two of your decisions.

The recognition-primed decision (RPD) model

Adapted from Klein (2008), Figure 1, which reproduces the model from Klein, Orasanu, Calderwood & Zsambok (Eds.), Decision making in action (1993). The dotted line: if no action works, go back and ask whether you have read the situation correctly.

Klein (2008) describes the RPD model as a blend of intuition and analysis. Pattern matching is the intuitive part: experience lets you recognise the situation and the typical response. Mental simulation is the deliberate part: you imagine how the action would play out before committing.

You met both in this simulation. Recognising that the jets were “drawing too much attention to themselves” was pattern matching. Imagining an attacker who advertised himself, and the chaff drifting toward the flagship, was mental simulation.

Recognition also gives you expectancies: what should happen next if your read is right. The real commander expected the jets to tire of the game and leave. A sudden turnout would have violated that expectancy, which is why he told his crew to watch for it: a violated expectancy is the signal to reassess.

Experts usually take the first workable option rather than comparing many — Simon’s satisficing. Klein’s studies found the first option experienced people consider is usually a good one (Klein, 2008).

When should you use formal comparison instead?

Klein does not say formal tools are wrong. His Table 5 (Klein, 1993, p. 56) sets out when each approach fits.

Condition	Fits experience-based judgment	Fits formal comparison of options
Time pressure	✓
Experienced decision-maker	✓
Conditions keep changing	✓
Goals are unclear	✓
Need to justify and document the choice		✓
Resolving conflict between stakeholders		✓
Need the optimal answer		✓
Many interacting variables to compute		✓

Klein’s examples: deciding where to store nuclear waste calls for formal comparison; deciding whether to abort a take-off when an engine fails does not.

References (APA)

AEGIS Command