In Get Better at Anything, author Scott Young asserts that mastering a new skill requires three key ingredients: observing success, practicing, and soliciting feedback on performance. This article will explore one means to improve upon the incorporation of two of these, observing success and soliciting feedback, into routine training for C2ABM professionals. It is challenging for the C2ABM community to incorporate these ingredients into routine training because there are few opportunities for C2ABM professionals to observe others’ successful performances, and instructional feedback is typically limited to a single instructor providing after-the-fact guidance during a debrief covering a single mission. As such, the sample size of material for instructors to refine is only a single mission, and feedback to the student comes from only a single source. The C2ABM community could address these challenges and more ably observe success and solicit feedback by developing a comprehensive “best practices” library, shared across the C2ABM community and incorporated into routine training.
Observe Success
Real World Example – Tetris
It took 25 years from the release of Tetris until the perfect score (999,999) was achieved in 2009. Eleven years later, in 2020, a player achieved a perfect score 12 times in a single tournament, during which another 40 players each played at least one perfect game. How did the Tetris community improve so dramatically, so quickly? They observed success and solicited feedback from the larger Tetris community as Tetris channels became popular amongst enthusiasts on the then-nascent YouTube. Posted videos offered players detailed insight into how the game could and should be played and included not only videos of the Tetris display itself, but also of players’ hand movements. Through these videos, novice players learned how experts played and could adopt their techniques. Additionally, comments on YouTube videos enabled Tetris enthusiasts to offer suggestions or critique overarching gameplay flaws in other players, helping players of all skill levels identify and correct their recurring errors.
This video library led novice Tetris players to adopt and perfect innovative new techniques, such as “hypertapping,” which combines a unique hand grip on the Nintendo controller with rapid bicep twitches to circumvent a system limitation that otherwise would render higher levels inaccessible, or “rolling,” a successor to hypertapping that many users found to be more accessible and less physically fatiguing. These techniques enabled Tetris competitors not only to reach the perfect score but also to play well beyond it, measuring Tetris achievement in levels cleared rather than by reaching the maximum displayable score. These techniques were adopted by the masses – including those who would first win tournaments using them – only because newer players were exposed to them on YouTube. When considering the relative simplicity of Tetris, the scope of innovation and improvement over decades – enabled by crowdsourcing the observation of success across the community – is remarkable. The C2ABM community should attempt to replicate this success.
Video Library
To afford C2ABM professionals greater opportunity to “observe success,” the community should maintain its own YouTube-like library of excellent missions that are readily accessible. While current playback libraries exist, they are hosted on less-accessible systems and contain long, often unedited videos of entire missions that are selected after the fact as interesting recordings. A more helpful library should contain principally recordings of portions of missions that were executed phenomenally. Most of these recordings should be created deliberately, wherein expert battle managers or battle management teams employ specific skillsets with the express intent to publish the results to the library. This will likely occur primarily during simulation missions, but capturing excellent “live” performances should also be considered. Perhaps intuitively, the library should be curated to include examples of excellent console mechanics and communication examples; but, going beyond this, the library should also include examples of exceptional team coordination. Where feasible and helpful, multiple operator consoles should be displayed side by side in a single video to enable viewers to observe excellent coordination among battle management teams.
To increase the likelihood of audience engagement, mission recordings should be cropped into one or multiple short video(s) – ideally no longer than six minutes each – that highlight specific well-executed techniques. To further increase the likelihood of engagement, this library should be maintained on a system that is readily accessible during daily study or planning time, and should ideally also be accessible to those outside the unit or base where the library is hosted.
Institutionalize “Observing Success”
Most unit tactics shops host weekly events focused on improving tactical proficiency, commonly in the form of a “tactics talk,” in which a specific topic is briefed and discussed with all available operators in the unit. These events could include playback of mission recordings to encourage widespread viewership of newly posted or otherwise relevant videos in the library. Tactics chiefs could put this into practice with relative ease by assigning a video to a junior C2ABM professional and working with that individual to watch, analyze, and craft relevant discussion topics to be presented during a weekly tactics talk.
To further encourage C2ABM operators to interact with the library, mission review could become a mandatory part of mission planning. The idea that “observing success” should be included in mission planning is not novel, though its implementation is typically approximated through the use of representative drawings on a whiteboard. Moving beyond the whiteboard to include short, relevant videos during mission planning and/or briefing could improve the implementation of “observing success” during mission planning. This would be especially helpful for demonstrating the use of key tools or techniques being prescribed during mission planning or when preparing for part-task trainer (PTT) simulation missions, wherein a narrow set of specific skills are to be practiced and refined.
Soliciting Feedback
The library could also be used for individual operators to post videos and solicit feedback from peers and instructors on how to improve. Instructors could highlight specific points of interest and direct students to post videos of these interest items as part of their mission debrief. If operators maintain their own “channels” within the library, trends that may not be apparent to individual instructors on individual missions may be identified and corrected. This is especially likely to yield results if instructors review prospective students’ channels as part of their mission preparation, rather than relying on word-of-mouth or written documentation from students’ previous training events.
Challenges & Risks
While few challenges are associated with using a well-crafted recording library, creating and maintaining such a library does pose a significant challenge. Most notably, the process of reviewing mission playback, selecting the most helpful short segments therein, using video editing software to crop the clip as desired, uploading the recording to the library, and appropriately labeling or filing the recording so it can be easily referenced by mission type, operator, etc., is hugely time-consuming. Completing all of the above steps for a single short clip would likely require hours of work, and may even require less technically savvy operators to dedicate additional time to learning how to take them. This time commitment may discourage or even preclude some operators from creating and posting videos to the library. Adopting AI-enabled editing tools, institutionalizing the processes described above, and assigning clear roles for operators, instructors, and tactics or training shops at the group, squadron, and wing level may partially mitigate this challenge, but it is unlikely to be completely overcome.
The risk associated with creating and using such a library is low, though the possibility of spreading bad habits or negative transfer could exist. These risks would likely manifest only in isolated cases, if at all, and are likely worthwhile risks to assume when considering the relative benefits of a comprehensive library.
Conclusion
Building a well-crafted mission recording library is one step that C2ABM units can take to better enable operators to observe success and solicit feedback, both of which are critical elements of improving in a skill. Institutionalizing the use of this library through mission planning, debriefing, daily study, and weekly tactics talks would ensure that operators take advantage of the benefits afforded by the library, and would make the substantial time investment required to create and maintain the library worthwhile. Doing so is likely to lead to better skill acquisition among operators of all skill levels and backgrounds, improving the quality of C2ABM provided by the community as a whole.
Lt Col Douglas “Opie” Foulk, USAF, is a Senior Air Battle Manager, currently on staff as a Legislative Affairs Officer at the United Stated Indo-Pacific Command. He previously served in various positions across multiple E-3G AWACS squadrons.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.
Photo by Kevin Malik on Pexels
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