Army aims for complex battlefield simulations in real-time, via smartphones

The Army already has invested billions of dollars in systems that try to connect small groups of soldiers to the network when they’re in austere environments. Now, it’s working on the next step: letting squads and platoons run their own complex modeling and simulation programs, even in spots where electric power is scarce and an enemy is jamming satellite communications.

Deployment of the new capabilities still is about a decade off, but Army researchers believe it’s realistic for the commanders of very small units to begin running advanced computations that serve as decision support tools for various courses of action they might want to take on the battlefield.

The Army has been using computer simulations to guide its tactical combat decisions for a long time, but those capabilities have mostly been confined to large battalion-size headquarters with stacks of servers, reliable power and reasonably good network access.

But the thinking has changed as advances in commercial technology have begun to make a huge amount of processing power available in small, low-power devices, said Lt. Col. Michael Baker, the military deputy for the Army’s command, power and integration directorate.

“We want to prevent, say, a squad leader from overlooking a possible high-quality course of action just because they don’t have visibility into all the information we’d like to bring to their attention,” he said. “The next thing is situational understanding. If I do have a bunch of information about arrayed enemy forces, what does that really mean? What are going to be the impacts of one decision or another, and what is the enemy trying to achieve, based on what we’ve seen so far? Really it comes down to prediction, which is critically important to taking situational understanding to the next level.”

The Army envisions that a platoon leader in charge of a few dozen soldiers will have access to situational awareness on their portion of the battlefield, automatically fusing together intelligence reports with data from a complex network of sensors that report on everything from from their own fuel supplies and logistics conditions to past enemy movements behavior in a given geographic area. Ideally, all of that data will be analyzed and fed to a small unit commander via a handheld device.

Rich and reliable data is necessary

Baker said the objective is to give a battlefield officer a range of options he or she can take, but it’s a careful balancing act. While technology developers don’t want to create a system that substitutes for a commander’s own judgment, they also don’t want to overwhelm a commander with so much data that the technology does more harm than good.

“We’ve got to get a better understanding of what an individual is capable of assessing all at once. We don’t want to set up an interface where the user just always selects what the computer says is the number one option,” Baker said. “You want the computer to say, ‘This action might have these consequences or these advantages,’ and it might be that you can stratify them. We can say that based on all the experience we have in this conflict, these one-third of the options seem to be the better ones, and these one-third are things we don’t recommend. We do want to make recommendations, but we don’t want to drive the user to a certain solution.”

In order for the forward-deployed modeling and simulation programs to generate useful recommendations on what a commander should do, they’ll need to be constantly fed with rich and reliable data. Baker said the only way that can happen is for the Army to connect many more of its systems to electronic sensors than are networked together right now.

So, for instance, the Army is working on technologies that will electronically monitor the fuel levels in each generator at a command post.

“Today, somebody has to go around and open the gas caps if we want to see how much fuel we’re using. More and more, we have the ability to take advantage of sensors,” he said. “To take another example, we have gunners’ sights that are analog devices right now. They collect a huge amount of information that never leaves a Bradley fighting vehicle. But you might be able to do some on-board processing that turns that into data points that could be added to a situational awareness map that helps us understand things about the terrain, things about the enemy that have been observed, and we want to automate that process so that that data’s integrated into one picture of the battlefield.”

Retaining the technological overmatch

Baker said the Army is targeting the deployment of its battlefield computation technology for incorporation into a concept it’s calling Command Post 2025. That project’s objectives include making sure the Army keeps the technological overmatch it’s enjoyed over the past decade, even when it fights against more advanced enemies, and to do so at a lower cost.

He said given recent advances in commercial technology, the Army hopes it will be able to employ that vision in a cost effective way that uses off-the-shelf components as its foundation and significantly reduces the need for legions of forward-deployed contractors to maintain the systems.

“Smartphones are a great example. If the Army were to try to develop that from scratch, the unit cost would be dramatically higher. And it’s also updated so frequently that we’d probably opt to replace them at the same pace as the civilian market rather than buy parts for them and sustain them in the field,” he said. “The explosion in computational power isn’t because of the military investment, it’s because there’s a large-scale interest in the commercial market, and we want to take advantage of that to reduce our logistics tail.”

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