Abstract: In future command and control (C2) centres, staff should be able to move about freely, unconstrained by microphone headsets, while their conversations are transcribed to text using speaker-independent speech-recognition devices. The output of the transcriber would be automatically labelled with the staff's identities. Automatic Speaker Identification (ASI) is a candidate to perform that back-end function. However, ASI accuracy remains lower than that of human speaker recognition, despite 40 years of R&D, because the technology does not cope well with a minority of speakers. In addition, the acoustical environment of C2 centres is very complex. It is strongly affected by reverberation and the cocktail-party and Lombard effects. These and the presence of low-energy speech degrade both speech and speaker recognition. Nevertheless, that degradation is expected to vary significantly from centre to centre. It is possible that the use of microphone arrays can render ASI operational, in at least some of those centres, especially if the number of speakers considered is small.