Tanner Yackley brand mark
Tanner Yackley
Human Performance · Autonomy
Research index

The aircraft was never the limiting factor.

Across more than a decade of remote operations, instruction, and evaluation, the hardware kept improving. The constraint that did not move was human: attention, supervision, decision-making under uncertainty, and the cognitive cost of distance. Human performance in remote warfare is the umbrella problem; the other four areas are the perspectives that emerged from working it.

Why these five?

One umbrella problem, four supporting perspectives.

Human performance in remote warfare is the umbrella problem: how operators, crews, and institutions sustain effective supervision of complex systems across distance, uncertainty, time, and consequence.

Context reconstruction, supervisory control, authority migration, and irreversibility are not independent topics. They are the perspectives that emerged from working the umbrella problem in the Ground Control Station, the evaluator's seat, and the classroom. Each one is a different angle on whether a person can hold an accurate picture of the situation and act effectively when intervention becomes necessary.

Legend

How to read this index.

Active

Open data collection, drafting, or fieldwork.

Emerging

Question formed; partners and methods being scoped.

Archived

Findings consolidated; no new work planned.

Research areas

Current agenda.

RA.01Active
Research area

Human Performance in Remote Warfare

SummaryThe operational, cognitive, and psychological demands of conducting warfare from a Ground Control Station, sustained over months and years. Sleep, attention, moral weight, identity, family, and the long arc of a remote career. This is the through-line; the other four areas are the angles from which I study it.

Operational examples
  • A pilot finishing a strike sortie, then driving home through school traffic, with no decompression between the two.
  • A squadron's accumulated fatigue after years of 24-hour orbits, expressed not as failure but as quiet, persistent degradation of judgment.
  • An evaluator noticing that a crew's technical proficiency stays high while their margin for an unusual situation steadily shrinks.
Open questions
  • ?What does career-scale human performance look like in this domain?
  • ?Which institutional supports actually translate into sustained readiness?
  • ?How do operators describe the work to themselves, and what does that language reveal?
Related publications
  • Drafting
    Long-form work on the human experience of remote warfare across a career.
  • Ongoing research
    Practitioner interviews and reflections gathered through Remote Warrior.
Related projects
  • ›Remote Warrior: research-informed community and public understanding effort focused on remote operations
  • ›Continuing collection of practitioner accounts from current and former crews
RA.02Active
Research area

Context Reconstruction Cost

SummaryThe cognitive and temporal cost an operator pays each time attention is broken (by a handoff, an interruption, a shift change, or a switch between tasks) and the work required to rebuild a usable mental model of the mission before the next decision.

Operational examples
  • A crew taking the seat mid-orbit and spending the first twenty minutes reconstructing why the previous crew was watching a particular compound.
  • An operator interrupted by a radio call returning to the screen and silently re-deriving which track was the priority.
  • A shift change where the written log captures the events but not the intent behind them, forcing the next crew to rebuild judgment from scratch.
Open questions
  • ?What does a 'fully reconstructed' picture actually contain, and who decides?
  • ?Which handoff artifacts shorten reconstruction time without flattening nuance?
  • ?How does context cost compound across a 24-hour orbit?
Related publications
  • Drafting
    Long-form treatment of handoff and reconstruction cost in remote operations.
  • Ongoing research
    Field notes and interview material from current and former RPA crews.
Related projects
  • ›Handoff and shift-change observation work with operational crews
  • ›Concept development for reconstruction-aware crew tools
RA.03Active
Research area

Supervisory Control Quality

SummaryA framework for evaluating how well an operator supervises an autonomous or semi-autonomous system across four dimensions: representation of system state, prediction of next behavior, prioritization of attention, and intervention when the system is wrong.

Operational examples
  • An operator monitoring an autonomous routing decision and recognizing, before the system does, that the next waypoint is no longer appropriate.
  • A crew accepting an automated recommendation that is technically correct but operationally wrong because the system cannot see what they can.
  • An evaluator distinguishing a student who is supervising the aircraft from one who is merely watching it.
Open questions
  • ?What separates a competent supervisor from a confident one?
  • ?Can supervisory quality be measured without interrupting the task?
  • ?How does quality degrade as autonomy capability increases?
Related publications
  • In development
    Working framework for assessing supervisory control quality beyond 'human in the loop.'
  • Ongoing research
    Refinement of the four-dimension model through instructor and evaluator practice.
Related projects
  • ›Supervisory control rubric intended for evaluator and instructor use
  • ›Scenario design work for human–autonomy teaming environments
RA.04Active
Research area

Authority Migration

SummaryDecision authority should sit with whoever holds the highest-fidelity understanding of the situation, not necessarily the highest rank. Authority migration studies how, when, and under what conditions that movement happens (or fails to) in distributed remote operations.

Operational examples
  • A sensor operator quietly holding the clearest picture of a developing situation while higher echelons continue to make calls on older information.
  • A mission commander deferring to the crew on the scope because they are the only ones who can actually see what is happening.
  • A handoff where the inbound crew, with fresh eyes, sees a pattern the outbound crew normalized, and the chain has to decide whose read carries.
Open questions
  • ?What organizational conditions make migration possible without breaking the chain of command?
  • ?How do crews signal that fidelity has shifted?
  • ?Where does autonomy itself become a holder of partial authority?
Related publications
  • Drafting
    Conceptual treatment of authority migration in distributed remote crews.
  • Planned
    Case-based article assembled from operational examples of fidelity-led authority shifts.
Related projects
  • ›Informal case library of authority-migration events drawn from operational experience
  • ›Discussion sessions with mixed-rank crews on when authority should move
RA.05Active
Research area

Irreversibility and Prioritization

SummaryNot all errors are equal. This line develops practical heuristics for prioritizing attention and intervention around actions that cannot be undone, and for training crews and autonomous systems to treat irreversibility as a first-class constraint.

Operational examples
  • A crew under workload triaging six concurrent demands and instinctively protecting the one decision that cannot be taken back.
  • An automated action that would be trivial to undo in simulation and impossible to undo in the world, treated identically by the interface.
  • Training a new crew to recognize that the most urgent task on the screen is rarely the most consequential one.
Open questions
  • ?How do operators currently recognize irreversibility under workload?
  • ?What does an autonomy stack owe the human before an irreversible action?
  • ?Can irreversibility be made visible without inducing paralysis?
Related publications
  • In development
    Working taxonomy of irreversibility for remote operations and supervisory control.
  • Planned
    Practitioner-facing piece on prioritizing the unrecoverable under workload.
Related projects
  • ›Irreversibility taxonomy applied to remote ISR and strike task structures
  • ›Early design thinking on surfacing irreversible branches in decision support
Working notes

An index, not an archive.

Practitioner-derived

Each area began as a question that surfaced in the Ground Control Station, the evaluator's seat, or the classroom, not in a literature search.

Methodologically plural

Interviews, instrumented scenarios, case libraries, and conceptual work are used together. The question chooses the method.

An index in motion

Status reflects current state of work. Titles and citations will appear here only when material is actually completed and published.