ARTICLE

September 2004

Battlefield Information Glut Not Always Useful to Soldiers

by Sandra I. Erwin

The U.S. military services need to find better ways to collect and manage intelligence in complex urban war zones, according to U.S. Joint Forces Command studies.

Although the Defense Department owns and operates a wealth of space, airborne and ground sensors, the data generated by these systems is not processed and disseminated in the most helpful fashion for ground troops to understand what is happening on the battlefield.

To help the services get a better grip on this problem, JFCOM recently launched a research project—which grew out of real-world lessons from Iraq—aimed at improving the “situational awareness” of troops in urban terrain, said Greg Conover, project manager at the Institute for Defense Analysis. IDA is under contract to JFCOM to develop a large-scale digital simulation that will postulate an urban battlefield circa 2017.

U.S. forces today cannot maneuver in urban areas as precisely as they do in open terrain, Conover said in an interview. The reason, in part, is that their equipment, tactics and intelligence tools are not optimized for operations in urban settings. Sensors that originally were designed for open-desert or jungle warfare, for example, have difficulties penetrating high buildings, underground bunkers and tunnels.

The family of sensors in the U.S. inventory, including overhead satellites and other systems, are limited by line-of-sight problems, Conover said. Sensors rely on communications that get obstructed by high buildings and rigid structures.

Additionally, the Defense Department has not yet figured out how to mesh sensor data and human intelligence, he added. “The man-machine interface is one of the critical aspects we are investigating.”

These intelligence shortfalls partly can be attributed to an over-reliance on technology, suggested Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. During a recent hearing, he urged Army officials to “pay close attention to how the rush to embrace new technology affects our thinking about warfare.” Further, “the intelligence problem we have in Iraq today is not solely the result of a lack of network sensors,” Hunter said. “We need to equip our troops with the best equipment we can, but ultimately their best defense lies in their ability to out-smart the enemy.”

To study the subtleties associated with merging sensor data and human intelligence, JFCOM engineers are creating a three-dimensional digital model of a large city.

The simulations will feature numerous types of sensors, although space sensors are not part of the mix.

“There are lots of problems with space sensors in urban areas,” said Conover. Satellites don’t provide detailed enough coverage of urban areas, he added. “We took a lot of the capability of sensors that might be put on space platforms and put them on lower altitude platforms.”

Although the military services operate sophisticated airborne sensors, they lack systems that are “agile” enough to respond quickly to the needs of ground troops, Conover said.

“It’s one thing to fly over the area briefly and cross-pass the data. But it’s something else to have a sensor that literally can respond to an agent or a unit on the ground, stop, hover, provide persistent views of selected areas.”

Today, he added, “we don’t have any platforms that a person could control, and move down a street, stop, turn and stare.” Among the most effective sensor platforms are unmanned aircraft, such as the Predator, but even these systems cannot “stop and perch,” Conover said.

Most sensors—radar, optical, seismic, acoustic, magnetic and others—should be adaptable to multiple platforms and applications, he said. The radar that tracks moving targets aboard the Air Force JSTARS aircraft, for example, could be put under the control of a special-operations team inside a building. “Or you could put them under the control of Army soldiers or Marines who are moving through the city and need to know what’s going on around the corner.”

The imagery and other data collected by the Predator generally have to be processed at some distant location before they can help a commander make tactical decisions, he noted. “Part of what we are trying to do is figure out how to reduce the latency.”

When one sees what is happening in Iraq today, it’s clear that the current technology has a long way to go, Conover said. “The idea that you can provide a video stream from a Predator is pretty impressive. But that only gives you a very limited view of a very limited area. … There is a lot they are not looking at.”

The Defense Department needs improved technologies to “fuse” data from multiple sensors and create a picture of the battlefield that integrates the information coherently, Conover said.

Several companies currently are working on this “sensor fusion” technology, but much work remains to be done, noted Ken Lindsey, technical director for integrated systems at the Raytheon Company, which is responsible for connecting all the ground sensors in the Army’s future combat systems program, a family of ground and air vehicles now in development.

The digital simulations created for the JFCOM experiment, called “Urban Resolve,” feature unprecedented levels of computer performance, making them some of the most sophisticated models ever seen in the Defense Department, Conover said.

The long-term plan is to create a synthetic environment that realistically simulates individual entities, as opposed to the crude models used today, where an Army division is represented by a single icon, rather than a collection of individuals and systems. This technology, Conover said, “opens up a whole new world for investigation.”

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