ARTICLE

August 2003

Desert Setting Tough on Combat ID Systems

War lessons and fratricide incidents spur upgrades to friend-or-foe technologies

by Michael Peck

Desert conditions during the war in Iraq proved a tough environment for U.S. combat identification systems designed to distinguish friend from foe.

Friendly fire incidents, said Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway, were “probably my biggest disappointment of the war.”

Conway commanded Marine ground forces during the conflict.

“Our weapons are so accurate, are so deadly ... that when [one of them] goes off the rail or it goes out the tube, it’s probably going to kill something. And so you’ve got to make certain that what you’re shooting at is indeed the enemy,” he told reporters last month.

Army and Marine combat vehicles, and troops in Iraq used four basic identification systems, which were hastily fielded after the first Gulf War:

Combat Identification Panels: The primary means of ground-to-ground identification for vehicles, CIPs are 24-inch x 30-inch panels painted with chemical agent resistant coating and with low emissive, high reflectivity tape.

Attached to combat vehicles, CIPs appear as cold spots when seen through thermal sights. They are dark patches when viewed through forward looking infrared (FLIR) sensors in white hot mode, and white patches when seen through FLIR black hot mode.

Prices range from $1,200 for a five-panel Abrams tank kit to $489 for a three-panel set for an M113 armored personnel vehicle.

Thermal Identification Panels: Primarily for air-to-ground vehicle identification, TIPs are similar to CIPS, except that they are made out of soft cloth cut into 4 ft. x 4 ft. panels. They cost $125 per panel.

Phoenix Junior Lights: Successors to the so-called Budd Light, Phoenix Junior lights flash every two seconds and are visible through night vision goggles. Priced at about $25 apiece, they are carried by infantry as well as troops.

“In a CNN clip, you could see the flashing on the vehicles as they were going down the road. Those were the Phoenix Juniors,” said Wayne Deutscher, a support contractor for the program manager, target identification and meteorological sensors at Fort Monmouth, N.J. They are powered by 9-volt batteries good for 100 hours, with each soldier receiving six batteries.

Glo-Tape: Used by combat personnel, these 1 inch by 1 inch plastic squares are worn on the top and rear of a helmet as well as both shoulders.

They appear as glowing spots in an infrared beam emitted by night vision goggles.

They are sold in packages of 144 squares for $70. Enough tape was sent to Iraq to outfit 50,000 troops.

Reliable Equipment
This equipment has low-tech simplicity and appears to be largely reliable, Army officials said.

Fratricide incidents that occurred in Iraq included the downing by Army Patriot missiles of a U.S. F-16 and a British Tornado.

Perhaps the most notorious incident was a strike by an F-15E near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which killed nearly 20 Kurds and a journalist and wounded several U.S. Special Forces soldiers. The vehicle that was struck did not have thermal identification panels, according to Deutscher.

The performance of the panels are degraded by desert conditions. The problem was first discovered in 1995 when CIPs and TIPs were attached to vehicles prepositioned in Kuwait.

“We did some tests on the panels and found they were not performing as expected. Fine dust over there had become embedded in the chemical agent resistant paint. It cut down the reflectivity, so they had to be washed,” said Deutscher, who has been doing fielding of the combat panels and Phoenix for the past five years.

“Even if you brush them off, you can’t get the dust out,” Deutscher added.

“It didn’t make them non-operable. It just cut down on the range you could see them.” He said sand reduced their visibility from 5 kilometers to about 2.5 kilometers, though this wasn’t a big danger, because tank engagement ranges are usually shorter.

As for TIPs, Deutscher said they had been tested against FLIR-equipped Air Force and Navy aircraft, which could detect them from as far as 10 to 12 kilometers under good thermal conditions, but only half that distance through dust.

Every combat vehicle in Iraq was equipped with CIPs, TIPs and a Phoenix Light on their antenna.

“What this gave them was a dual capability to be identified by FLIRs on M-1s, Bradleys and TOW [missile] vehicles, and through night vision goggles with the Phoenix Lights,” said Deutscher.

In preparation for the conflict, the Army shipped 7,500 CIP kits, 20,000 TIP panels, cloth panels, 24,000 Phoenix Juniors (and 120,000 9-volt batteries for them) and 140,000 Glo-Tape squares.

The Army also has been tweaking its existing combat ID equipment. For one, Phoenix Junior lights are being supplanted by more advanced Phoenix lights with reprogrammable coded flashes that flare up to every five seconds.

Deutscher said the Army also will be consolidating its array of CIPs.

“We have CIPs designed for 59 different Army vehicles,” as well as Marine vehicles, such as AAVP7s and LAVs, he noted.

“We are going to cut down on the number of different kits that we have. Right now, for example, we have eight or nine different Humvee variations, and maybe we can cut that down to two by reconfiguring the panels.”

One problem is that the Army originally demanded that CIPs fit onto existing free space on vehicles, regardless of whether that was the most visible spot. The one-size-fits-all panels also have been shoehorned on to a variety of vehicles, with some Marine vehicles needing TIPs to be substituted for CIPs. Now CIPs will be configured for specific platforms.

Deutscher noted that troops in the field have requested a consolidated device that “would be a dual frequency light that would operate in the thermal region and the near-IR, so that you could view them through either a thermal device or night vision goggles.”

One is already available, but “it has to have an encoder to work. It is expensive and difficult to use. We are developing a simpler one.”

This is one reason why the Army is opting for a high-tech solution. It wants to limit blue-on-blue casualties to no more than 3 percent of losses, according to Pete Glickerdas, head of the Army’s combat identification research and development program at Fort Monmouth.

Friendly fire is estimated to have accounted for about 17 percent of casualties in the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 and as many as 20 percent in World War II.

Coalition Operations
The Coalition Combat Identification (CCID) advanced concept technology demonstration is exploring a family of systems for ground-to-ground and air-to-

ground CID. It is a joint effort between the Army’s Communications Electronics Command and the U.S. Joint Forces Command, along with the U.K., France, Germany, Canada and Australia.

One device being tested is the Battlefield Target ID Device (BTID). An all-weather question-and-answer system using millimeter-wave signals exchanged between vehicles, BTID is designed to intervene at that crucial moment before the trigger is pulled. Interrogation and response occurs in less than a second, with an estimated 98 percent accuracy rate at a range of three miles.

BTID is based on the Battlefield Combat ID System (BCIS), which was canceled because of cost and questions about interoperability between U.S. allies. BTID will be STANAG (NATO standard) compliant. It could be used in new platforms, such as the Future Combat System, and can be retrofitted on existing vehicles.

Also being developed is the Radio Based Combat ID (RBCI), which is software that piggybacks GPS coordinates upon signals from the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) combat net radios. It is a low-cost approach that takes advantage of the widespread use of SINCGARS radios among U.S. allies. Though it is only suitable for air-to-ground use (air density and longer identification times preclude vehicle-to-vehicle applications), RBCI adds no additional equipment or weight to aircraft.

BTID and RBCI are scheduled to finish testing by 2005.

However, “technology alone is never going to solve everything,” said Army spokeswoman Maj. Amy Hannah.

Friendly fire casualties will never be reduced to zero, she said, but they can be reduced through enhanced technology and increased situational awareness among troops and their commanders.

In addition to BTID and other CID equipment, the Army is counting on the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below (FBCB2) and Blue Force Tracking systems to improve situational awareness of the location of friendly and hostile forces.

The FBCB2 is part of the Army’s “digitization” effort that began in the mid-1990s. The participants of an FBCB2 network can see friendly and enemy positions on their vehicle computer screens. The information is obtained via a satellite link.

According to Conway, “what we truly need is something that can identify a friendly vehicle. It either squawks or beeps or emits some sort of power source that tells a shooter—an airplane or a tank or whatever—that they’re looking at a friendly piece of equipment. ... We’ve been trying to develop that now ever since the Gulf War, without success, I might add.”

Whoever comes up with a solution to friendly fire, Conway noted, “will be very rich, indeed. Because it continues to be something that we see happen in the U.S. military, and it’s really something that we’ve got to stop.”

Seeking to illustrate the complexity of the combat ID problem, Adm. Ed Giambastiani, chief of Joint Forces Command, showed reporters a copy of a combat vehicle identification guide that has pictures of the thermal signature of U.S. and U.K. combat vehicles.

“They can see what every vehicle looks like through a thermal imager,” Giambastiani explained. “A human being has to read this and remember hundreds of images. Is this the perfect way to do combat ID? No.”

Back To Top