An officer walks into a coffee shop that looks like a typical day, and ten seconds later, it isn’t. A seasoned officer who anticipated the situation escalating from normal to threat in a matter of moments might claim it was simply a case of situational awareness. They saw something and knew it wasn’t right, so they were on high alert when they needed to mobilize. But situational awareness, according to research, is more than paying attention to spidey senses. It comes down to whether the officer’s read of the situation kept pace with three processes in their brain.

Dr. Mica Endsley, a human factors researcher whose work grew out of aviation and military systems, defined situational awareness as a three-level process: perception, comprehension, and projection. The model has since been applied across aviation, emergency medicine, and law enforcement, anywhere a person has to build an accurate picture of a changing environment fast enough to act on it.

For training designers, Endsley’s model is useful because it breaks a vague goal like “improve situational awareness” into three distinct skills, each of which can be trained and evaluated on its own.

 

Level 1: Perception

Perception is the raw intake of information: what’s in the environment, who’s present, what’s changing. This is the level most training defaults to, because it’s the easiest to see and the easiest to grade. Did the officer notice the hand in the pocket? How long did it take them to notice the second subject in their peripheral vision?

Scenario-based training works well here, especially in a 180-degree or 300-degree immersive theater system, even more so in a fully immersive virtual reality system. A full audio environment, background movement, multiple subjects, and lowlight conditions all give an officer more to perceive, which means more opportunities to practice noticing.

 

Level 2: Comprehension

Perception without comprehension is just an input. Comprehension is what the officer does with what they’ve noticed: recognizing that a hand near a waistband, combined with a subject’s refusal to show both hands, means something specific, a read that depends on pattern recognition and training experience more than raw attention.

When a scenario’s branching outcome depends on how an officer interprets what they’re seeing rather than just what action they take, the instructor is asking them to build and test that comprehension in real time.

 

Level 3: Projection

Projection is the forward-looking piece: given what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen next. This is the level that separates a reactive officer from one who’s already positioned for what comes after the next three seconds. It’s also the hardest to train because it requires the first two levels to be working well already.

When an instructor can shift a scenario’s trajectory based on an officer’s decisions, the training creates real consequences for a projection that was accurate or one that wasn’t, in a way a fixed-outcome drill can’t.

 

The Debrief

Most after-action reviews focus on outcome: what the officer did, and whether it was right. Endsley’s model points to a more useful question, which is when the officer’s read of the situation changed and what triggered that change. An officer who freezes or overreacts hasn’t necessarily failed at decision-making. They may have failed at perception or comprehension several steps earlier, and the decision was simply the first visible symptom.

Structuring a debrief around the three levels gives instructors a way to locate where a breakdown actually happened, rather than only where it became visible.

 

Training the Whole Loop

Endsley’s model is a reminder that situational awareness runs on three separate skills operating on a fast loop, and each one can degrade under stress in a different way. Training that only tests the outcome of that loop, a shoot or no-shoot decision, a use-of-force call, misses the chance to find out which part of the loop needs work.

MILO’s mission-specific scenario library, fully immersive environments, and instructor-controlled branching are built to exercise all three levels. Paired with an after-action review process that unpacks the comprehension and projection, that gives instructors a much clearer picture of where an officer’s situational awareness skills are effective, and where they can specifically be developed.