Instability of Distributed Decision Making in Command and Control Systems

We argue that the phenomenon of autocatalytic decision overload (ADO) may be a key mechanism contributing to catastrophic collapse of command and control (C2) systems. We introduce the concept of ADO and describe typical scenarios for such a collapse. We then provide a simple nonlinear difference equation model for the dynamics of error propagation in C2 systems which exhibits the ADO phenomena and examine extensions of this model to complex networks of decision making units. We discuss these examples and finally provide a practitioner’s guide to mitigating the ADO phenomenon.