Battling friendly fire

From lab to battlefield
None of the technologies being tested in September was available during the start of the Iraq War, according to Lt. Col. Bill McKean, the operational manager of the Urgent Quest exercises. Some, like the Battlefield Target Identification Device (BTID), are “vehicle-to-vehicle” systems, meant primarily to prevent tank-to-tank or helicopter-to-Humvee fratricide. Separate versions are in development in the U.S., led by Raytheon, and in Britain and France by contractors there.

Others rely on radio frequency technologies that “query” constantly and await a response. These systems can rely on modifications to existing radio systems carried by infantry platoons, or “query” systems using radio frequency tags to identify a friendly tank or position.

Systems that would use lasers instead of radios or satellites to verify identification, are the least developed, but have proven useful at up to 3 kilometers, says Ralph Troisio, Chief of the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate's Combat Identification Branch at Ft. Monmouth, N.J. “We’re working to get it up to 5.5 kilometers, which is the stand off distance for an [Abrams] M-1 tank,” he says. “And we hope to have a soldier to soldier version, but that’s a few years off yet.”

All the technologies are being developed to a common NATO standard – a hugely important issue given the recent history of coalition operations. Put simply, the U.S. military is an efficient killing machine, and any other military nearby, friend or foe, invariably takes fire. British forces in southern Iraq, for instance, reported more than 30 instances of being fired on by American forces in the 12 months ending March 2005. Bulgarian, Italian and Canadian troops all have been killed in accidental attacks in the past several years. The British were so concerned that they sent several Land Rovers and uniforms to their American colleagues for instructional purposes.

There is real hope, McKean says, these new technologies can make such mistakes far less frequent. The idea is to provide commanders, pilots, tankers and eventually every soldier with a gun some degree of “situational awareness” – a mantra these days among high-tech “network centric warfare” advocates. They see the potential for turning every soldier, vehicle and aircraft into a great intelligence gathering machine, an all seeing information grid.

“All these battlefield identification technologies are complementary, not competing,” says McKean.

Laptops or PDAs?
But there are disputes between allies and even among the American services over the best way to deploy these technologies. The Marine Corps, for instance, has been testing a devise produced by Northrop-Grumman called D-DATS — “dismounted data automatic terminals” — which are basically a jarhead version of the civilian PDA. The devise displays a map of the local area and pinpoints other units in the network on the map with icons.

The Army, on the other hand, prefers the idea of arming its platoons with laptop computers — the thought being that giving each soldier a PDA could very well be more distracting than useful. “There’s still a divergence of opinion,” says Gerrit Le Grand, program development manager for Northrop-Grumman’s Missions Systems division. “It’s not an anti-fratricide system, it’s a ‘situational awareness’ system, though certainly we think they reduce fratricide. They’re still trying to decide the right level at which this technology should be deployed, and whether to go with PDA type or a notebook style computer.”

“Finding what level of information is useful to a soldier is part of our job,” says Bobby Klegg, blue force tracking branch chief at Joint Forces Command. “There’s a point at which they have too much information to look at in order to do their jobs.”

Whatever the decision, nobody involved in the effort believes friendly fire deaths can be eliminated completely. “Knowing where your own forces are is at least as important as knowing where the enemy is,” says Col. Allard. “But there will come a point where all the systems have been deployed and it all comes down to the ultimate system: the human brain. If you’re under stress and tension, and add a little fear in there, will you wait that extra one second to pull the trigger? I think it takes someone who has been in that position to answer for sure.”

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