Imagine you are a tactical coordinator (TACCO) on a P-8 Poseidon, the Navy’s newest antisubmarine warfare (ASW) aircraft. Your job is to maximize the tactical impact of your sensors and weapons while leading your crew. The United States is at war and you are tasked with finding and killing an adversary submarine. Intelligence indicates there is a high probability you will find your target, so you take what little time you have before the flight to make sure you’ve thought through every contingency. You know what behaviors and detection ranges other crews have observed against similar submarines, so you sketch out a few basic plans you can carry out rapidly if you have a detection opportunity. You use a few rules-of-thumb and some mental math to come up with the numbers behind your tactics. The plans are by no means optimized, but at least you have something with a chance of working.
You get to the plane, takeoff, and head toward your search area. Once you get on-station, you sample the environment and realize your plan was all wrong. The detection ranges will be far less than anticipated, and all of the tactics you planned will be laughably inadequate. You do not have the time to laboriously create new ones, though. So, you adjust your old plans to make them a little bit more conservative. It’s an art form practiced by decades of TACCOs before you. It was fine when the art hadn’t always worked in peacetime, but the stakes are much higher now.
You soon get a sniff of your target and enact your planned response to refine its exact position, course, and speed. While trying to do that, the target slips away. The rule-of-thumb plan you massaged for the dynamic environment was not up to the task. Years of training, flying, and deploying were for naught. And the adversary submarine is free to wreak havoc on U.S. forces. It did not have to be this way, though.
