From: Zhiyuan Institute of Strategy and Defense
Compiled by: Blue Mountain
Although the automation of weapons and equipment and the automation of troop command continue to increase, the operational effectiveness of the unit still depends to a large extent on the combat potential of individual soldiers. This article studies the modern individual soldier situational awareness methods and technologies that may be adopted, and uses materials from foreign publications to analyze the main development trends of individual combat equipment that will soon adopt new materials and methods. These technical solutions will greatly expand the scope of soldiers and the detachment commander’s situational awareness range.
Currently, countries around the world are formulating various national-level "future soldier" combat equipment research and development plans, among which the main ones are: Australia's "Ground 125 Phase 4 'Integrated Soldier System'", South Africa's "African Warrior", France's "Equipment and Communications Integrated Infantry-II" (FELIN-II), Germany's "Future Soldier System" ("Sword"), Italy's "Future Soldier", Spain's "Future Soldier", the Netherlands' "Soldier Modernization Program", Norway's "Norwegian Arctic Modular Cyber Soldier", Portugal's "Future Warrior", Singapore's "Advanced Warrior System", Switzerland's "Modular Soldier System", Sweden's MARKUS, Israel's "Anog", IAS/AISS, IICS / "Dominator", Britain's "Future Integrated Soldier Technology", Belgium's "Belgian Soldier Transformation System", Poland's "Project Titan", Czech Republic's "21st Century Soldier", India's F-FINSAS, Canada's "Integrated "Cultivated Soldier System Plan", the United States' "Future Soldier" and "Light Tactical Combat Uniform", and Japan's "Advanced Individual Equipment System"1. Among these concepts, one of the main directions is to improve the situational awareness and reconnaissance capabilities of lower-level soldiers.
Individual Soldier Situational Awareness Intelligent Technology Equipment
When evaluating the main areas of use of advanced technologies in the military, the main focus should objectively be on how to technically improve weapon effectiveness (force command, reconnaissance, cyber warfare, logistics, weapons and equipment autonomy and robotics, etc.). But situational awareness is also an important component of combat operations effectiveness.
The various combat operations in which the Russian armed forces have participated in recent years have shown that the urgency of the issue of individual soldier situational awareness in urban combat has increased significantly. In this context (individual soldier) combat equipment plays a great role in improving situational awareness. In the composition of (individual soldier) combat equipment, technical equipment that can greatly expand the range of individual soldiers' situational awareness and complete a series of life and combat capability maintenance tasks are increasing. Indeed, eliminating the impact of danger sources on soldiers as much as possible and providing them with technical equipment that can complete tasks with minimal risk to life is one of the important research and development goals of individual combat equipment.
How and what do soldiers use to control their situation on the battlefield? How to improve its situational awareness? Among the six sense organs that people rely on to experience the world around them, four are potentially effective in the context of this article: vision, hearing, smell, and vestibular organs. Obviously, improving the technical equipment that can provide application capabilities in these areas will help improve the capabilities of soldiers.
Figure 1. Hazardous situational awareness range (blue) and required situational awareness range (green)
Figure 1 illustrates a dangerous situation: there is no visual or acoustic contact between soldiers occupying their respective positions, and the mission is changing.
At present, the formation of individual soldiers' situational awareness comes from the intelligence, terrain maps, compasses, communication and reconnaissance equipment obtained from superior commanders (when assigning tasks), as well as observation of the surrounding situation, their own intuition and inference.
Combat effectiveness of Soldiers and tactical elements can be improved by leveraging new equipment to enhance situational awareness and information connectivity throughout the unit, while also simplifying coordination among Soldiers and with higher headquarters during combat conditions.
We are forming key requirements for situational awareness capability support equipment.
Situational awareness ensures continuity
From a situational awareness perspective, current visual and acoustic contact between soldiers is decisive in many ways. New tasks often arise during combat, and soldiers' positions change rapidly, so visual and acoustic contact are often interrupted. This can lead to soldiers disappearing from the common information field and a certain "interruption" of situational awareness. This can lead to independent, but sometimes ineffective, action. Restoring situational awareness after a period of time can also be dangerous because important events may have occurred during this period. The requirement for continuity of situational awareness is therefore one of the important and critical requirements.
Requirements for visual interfaces
Telescopes are essentially a standard method of enhancing long-term visual perception, but thanks to the information technology that has been developed so far, it has been possible to develop systems that can directly record soldiers' physical parameters, combat environment information, and information from headquarters, other combatants, and reconnaissance systems. Optoelectronic system that transmits to and visualizes the mask or goggles. With the use of virtual reality technology, information can be projected into real-world scenarios visible to soldiers.
Figure 2. HoloLens augmented reality glasses 2
It is expected that by 2030, foreign countries will develop a new human-computer interactive communication platform that can provide in-depth visual, tactile and olfactory immersive experiences. Solutions are currently being developed for immersive virtual reality for soldiers who can sense the world around them and track their location. Augmented reality and mixed reality make it possible to see and interact with the world. Chatbots, virtual personal assistants, and Internet-connected helmet-mounted virtual reality and augmented reality glasses and lenses (Figure 2) will show huge potential for use.
Requirements for supplementary information assurance means
Modern small robotic technology and equipment can be used to enhance the information assurance and situational awareness of individual soldiers (Figure 3). This can be either a ground robot or an aerial robot.
There is an urgent need to include integrated systems including nano, micro and small drones as well as ground robotic technology systems into the composition of individual combat equipment to conduct reconnaissance and kill the enemy on the basis of miniaturization of robotic technology equipment.
Figure 3. "Black Hornet" PRS8 micro unmanned helicopter 3
Requirements for acoustic interfaces
Modern combat is objectively full of excess sound. Therefore, identifying useful information from environmental "noise" is an important application task. It is predicted that by 2030, most analysis needs will be formed or automatically formed with the help of natural language and voice search and processing. This is a very important requirement for future combat equipment. The use of headphones with integrated voice assistant and translation, active noise suppression is an innovation in this context.
"Smell" requirements
A current trend in this area is the use of chemical and/or biological weapons alarm sensors. Sensors embedded in individual soldier equipment should predetermine the presence and concentration of toxic substances in the air and warn soldiers of contamination risks. The individual protective equipment issues instructions to enter working status and notifies the superior commander and other members of the unit. The condition of filtration and protective equipment and the time they can (safely) remain in the contaminated area should be continuously tracked.
"Tactile" requirements
The human body can sense pain and temperature, and soldiers can wear gear to achieve or counteract these sensations. Bulletproof vests are the most direct means of reducing pain. On the one hand, they have a protective function, and on the other hand, they can reduce pain. In the future, military uniforms with soldiers' physical status and health monitoring functions will be developed. Personal sensors installed on soldiers' bodies and equipment may be the technical basis of such military uniforms. They can automatically transmit biometric parameters of the soldier's physical condition (pulse, respiratory rate, body temperature) to the commander, and alert the soldier (visible enemy use). and various active optoelectronic devices in the infrared electromagnetic wave band to detect whether the enemy uses biological and chemical weapons or there is radioactive contamination in the surroundings).
In modern warfare, it is important to assess the dose burden of all personnel in order to determine combat effectiveness under the influence of radiation factors and to develop the best methods of action under radiation-affected conditions. Radiation dose can be classified as tactile, but there are conditions. The development of radiation reconnaissance and monitoring equipment is an important direction. This direction is to develop radiation (detected by active photoelectric devices of visible light and infrared electromagnetic waves) alarm sensors. Such sensors can indicate danger immediately, eliminating the need for calculations of actual and predicted dose burdens. The current dose burden indicator can also be transmitted to a monitoring device - a helmet or glasses.
"Vestibular Organ" Requirements
With the help of the vestibular organ, people can feel their balance and spatial status, speed up or slow down their movements, and feel their own weight.
The active development of robotics equipment has promoted the development of "exoskeleton" technical solutions. The latter's key mission is to enhance the physical strength and capabilities of soldiers. In terms of military exoskeletons, in order to turn the exoskeleton into a comprehensive system that can integrate each component of each system of combat equipment, artificial intelligence technology is currently used, and artificial intelligence is responsible for mutual coordination, monitoring and sending instructions. Furthermore, this technology will be available in all future systems for diagnosis, monitoring of the condition of individual components, and for technical maintenance instructions.
Sixth sense (intuition)
Access to intelligent technological solutions may be the most interesting use of new technologies when it comes to processing intuitive information. Predicting future events based on the information soldiers have in real time will become a specialized task. The main task here is to understand and identify intuitive thinking in a form comprehensible to such systems. The above tasks can be accomplished by determining thinking through oral narration, discussing the situation with other soldiers and analyzing the text and extracting a predetermined type of knowledge from it. At first glance it may seem that highly technical prediction and decision-making models are not needed here, predictions depend on the experience and knowledge of the soldier, but without such models it is difficult to formulate achievable future situation scenarios. However, we cannot yet expect to quickly develop effective solutions in this direction.
Requirements for future communication equipment
Having a stable, concealed, reliable, low-energy wireless communication network that can quickly exchange information is a necessary condition for soldiers to collaborate with each other.
Such networks can be organized using wireless mesh networks. In this kind of network, each device can be connected to any other device directly or through intermediate nodes in the network. The distance between users can be hundreds of meters and can increase to thousands of meters depending on relays. This kind of network does not require cable connections, but uses radio waves to transmit data. Because no main transmitter or potentially damaged cables are used, such a network is difficult (or virtually impossible) to hack, suppress, or disrupt. One of the disadvantages of this type of network is the slow data transfer speed. But transmitting information like sensor readings (which rarely exceed a few tens of bits in size) doesn't require high transmission speeds.
Use "blockchain" technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger, a chronological list of cryptographically signed transaction records agreed upon and shared by all participants in the network. The main value of blockchain and distributed data directories is to ensure decentralized trust among network participants who do not trust each other. The value of this technology is difficult to overestimate when soldiers have to coordinate their actions within a network during combat operations. And this need has always been there. Here, too, there is the receipt and confirmation of receipt of orders, the reporting of task completion results, and the coordination of joint actions within the squad.
It can be seen that in order to ensure the situational awareness of soldiers, there is an urgent need to actively use information that can project information onto real-world situation maps visible to soldiers (augmented reality technology), as well as from headquarters, other operational actors, drones and ground robots. Multifunctional combat helmet with information visualization of technical systems, aiming equipment, personal sensors. The individual soldier visual information system can be made into various panels (face masks, glasses, bracelets, watches, tablets, etc.). This system is a system that can receive various information. For example, information about enemy positions, remaining ammunition and terrain maps, movement directions, videos (pictures) from surveillance systems, etc. can be transmitted to the corresponding panels in real time.
Situationally aware soldiers in the unit's chain of command
Foreign countries understand the joint combat command information network as the sum of command, communication, navigation and reconnaissance technical equipment, used for the continuous acquisition, collection, processing, research, induction, analysis, evaluation, display of environmental data, and between all members of the information space Exchange information in real time. The equipment in Table 1 enables every soldier in the unit to access a common information space. At the same time, they are both users and sources of information. The expanded sensing range allows them to obtain information about the enemy's location, strength, and equipment in advance before direct fire contact. Information.
Table 1. Situational awareness capabilities of individual combat equipment of advanced armies in the current and future world
The currently emerging Internet of Battle Things technology adopts an innovative collaborative organization method of personnel and information support equipment4. At the same time, unlike the Internet of Things, where communication objects are called “things”, communication objects in the combat Internet of Things are called devices, which is obviously more correct and consistent with reality. It seems wrong to think of future soldiers only as information users. They should be regarded as living "things" in the "combat Internet of Things", independent and very important components of a network of interacting living "sensors". Indeed, other soldiers are living "things", and it does not matter whether a certain sensor that receives or generates information is alive or inanimate. This is not inconsistent with the three basic principles of the "combat IoT", namely: the concept of combat IoT is associated with objects, and soldiers are objects; the combat IoT is a tree-like multi-level network, and soldiers are members of this network Fully empowered components; objects in the combat IoT actively interact with each other, and soldiers should be able to both obtain information from sensors and command, that is, assign tasks to sensors.
Networking and reliably interconnecting such soldiers, who are equipped to work together with military machines, can most efficiently accomplish their missions using knowledge gained from comprehensive surveillance of the battle space and an expanded understanding of the command's intent. .
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