Does Military Experience Influence Intel Collection Efficacy when Providing Chatter Locations on a Geographical Map

Future military planning relies heavily on the information collected from Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations to support data-driven decision-making. In particular, ISR collections that utilize imagery intelligence (IMINT) can detect, track, and target our adversaries ground movement behaviors and headquarter locations in near-real time. However, understanding when and why IMINT collections should be conducted is a challenging problem intel analysts are facing. To combat this issue, the 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base developed Intrage. Intrage is a strategic decision-making game with the premise of accelerating the understanding of ISR operations. Methods: The study consists of two groups, 25 military participants and 25 non-military participants from WPAFB. Participants were provided with an overview of Intrage and requested to complete two Phases of the game. In Phase I, participants were provided the Intrage map with chatter locations and requested to conduct four intel collections. Following Phase I, participants were informed that their collections were inconclusive. In Phase II, participants were provided the Intrage map with the same chatter locations and requested to conduct two new intel collections. The objective was to determine if a correlation exists between military and non-military participants regarding intel collection efficacy when providing chatter locations on the fictional map of Intrage. Results: An analysis of variance was performed depicting conducted collections when the collection encompassed four or less chatter locations, five to seven chatter locations, and eight or more chatter locations. There was not a statistically significant difference detected between groups when conducted collections consisted of four or less chatter locations. However, there was a statistically significant difference between groups when conducted collections consisted of five to seven chatter locations (p=0.02). Military participants conducted significantly less intel collections compared to non-military participants. In addition, there was a statistically significant difference between groups when conducted collections consisted of eight or more chatter locations (p=0.03). Military participants conducted significantly more intel collections compared to non-military participants. Moreover, in Phase II there was not a significant difference between groups with respect to conducted collections and provided chatter locations. Conclusion: The findings provide underlying evidence that military experience does influence intel collection efficacy when provided chatter locations on a geographical map. Nevertheless, as both military and non-military participants engaged in additional phases of Intrage, a learning effect was observed resulting in similar performance metrics.