"Training the Naturalistic Decision Maker" Joint Task Force commanders and their subordinates are highly experienced officers, particularly with respect to combat operations. Command decision making is a critical skill for these officers, but it is a skill that is difficult to define, assess, and train. Opportunities for real-life experiences are rare, therefore, the most must be made of training opportunities. However, serious questions exist concerning how to train commanders to make decisions. What skills do they need? How should they be trained? This paper addresses these questions. The authors address a specific set of skills that are utilized by experienced decision makers in novel situations. While naturalistic models of decision making have tended to emphasize recognitional processes, recognition is inadequate when no familiar pattern fits the current situation. Although recognition is at the heart of proficient decision making, other processes may often be crucial for success. The authors argue that many of these processes, which verify the results of recognition and improve situation understanding in novel situations, are meta-recognitional in function. These skills include identifying key assessments and the recognitional support for them, checking stories and plans based on those assessments, noticing conflicts among recognitional meanings of cues, elaborating stories to explain a conflicting cue, being sensitive to explaining away too much conflicting data, and attempting to generate alternative coherent stories to account for data. This paper further describes methods for teaching these skills and some preliminary results of studies designed to assess these training methods.