Situation Awareness - History

History

Although the term itself is fairly recent, the concept has roots in the history of military theory—it is recognizable in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, for instance. The term itself, can be traced also to World War I, where it was recognized as a crucial component for crews in military aircraft (Press, 1986).

Before being widely adopted by human factors scientists in the 1990s, the term was first used by United States Air Force (USAF) fighter aircrew returning from war in Korea and Vietnam (see Watts, 2004). They identified having good SA as the decisive factor in air combat engagements—the "ace factor" (Spick, 1988). Survival in a dogfight was typically a matter of observing the opponent's current move and anticipating his next move a fraction of a second before he could observe and anticipate his own. USAF pilots also came to equate SA with the "observe" and "orient" phases of the famous observe-orient-decide-act loop (OODA Loop) or Boyd cycle, as described by the USAF fighter ace and war theorist Col. John Boyd. In combat, the winning strategy is to "get inside" your opponent's OODA loop, not just by making your own decisions quicker, but also by having better SA than the opponent, and even changing the situation in ways that the opponent cannot monitor or even comprehend. Losing one's own SA, in contrast, equates to being "out of the loop."

Clearly, SA has far reaching applications as it is needed for individuals and teams to function effectively in their environment. Thus, we are beginning to see SA going beyond the field of aviation and work being conducted in a wide variety of domains. Currently, the study of SA is now being examined in such diverse areas as air traffic control, nuclear power plant operation, vehicle operation and anesthesiology (Endsley, 1995b; Gaba, Howard & Small, 1995; Collier & Follesf, 1995; Bolstad, 2000, Sollenberger & Stein, 1995).