Are Naval Tactical Data System--Combat Information Center Officers at Risk Due to AI?

Manage the operation of communications, detection, and weapons systems essential for controlling air, ground, and naval operations. Duties include managing critical communication links between air, naval, and ground forces; formulating and implementing emergency plans for natural and wartime disasters; coordinating emergency response teams and agencies; evaluating command center information and need for high-level military and government reporting; managing the operation of surveillance and detection systems; providing technical information and advice on capabilities and operational readiness; and directing operation of weapons targeting, firing, and launch computer systems.

The occupation "Command and Control Center Officers" has been assigned a base automation risk of 0.0%, indicating near-total resistance to automation. This stems primarily from the unique, high-stakes environment in which such officers operate—making critical decisions in real-time, frequently under rapidly changing or unpredictable conditions. While advanced algorithms can support certain elements of information processing, the overarching need for rapid human judgment, ethical decision-making, and the capacity to respond to unforeseen events makes these roles extremely challenging to automate. As such, machine intelligence may serve as a tool for aggregating data or suggesting potential courses of action, but it lacks the capacity to assume full command responsibilities or account for broader strategic contexts and human factors. Within the duties of Command and Control Center Officers, the top three most automatable tasks include: 1) standardized routine reporting (gathering and transmitting regular status updates), 2) initial information sorting (filtering and prioritizing incoming data streams), and 3) basic surveillance monitoring (tracking live feeds for clear, rule-based anomalies). These activities are characterized by consistency, well-defined parameters, and minimal requirement for discretionary judgment, making them suitable candidates for intelligent automation and decision-support systems. However, these automatable tasks represent only a fraction of the entire job profile, and their automation serves more to augment than to replace the officer's work. Conversely, the most automation-resistant tasks revolve around 1) real-time crisis decision-making (synthesizing incomplete or ambiguous information to formulate a response), 2) ethically-charged leadership (making final calls that affect lives and crucial assets), and 3) interdisciplinary coordination (conveying nuanced information and intentions across diverse human teams and external partners). These tasks require bottleneck skills such as advanced situational awareness (expert level), strategic and adaptive thinking (expert level), and emotional intelligence (advanced level), all of which depend on human cognition, intuition, and interpersonal skills that current AI systems cannot emulate. The necessity to rapidly integrate soft skills with contextual expertise ensures that the automation risk for this occupation remains minimal.