Making the Soldier Decisive on Future Battlefields (2013) / Chapter Skim
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2 Capabilities
2 Capabilities
Pages 25-58
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From page 25... ...
The committee believes that removing deficiencies and taking advantage of capability opportunities in these five areas is the key to giving future dismounted TSUs and the Soldier decisive overmatch across the range of missions and tasks the Army has envisioned for them. Situational Understanding includes (a)
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From page 26... ...
the situational understanding achieved when a TSU or individual combines, interprets, stores, and retains Level 1 data (this is referred to as Level 2 situational awareness below) , plus (c)
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From page 27... ...
Consider, for instance, the role of decision-making in military effects, which depends on situational understanding. As described in two recent reports on science and technology that would contribute to stabilization and reconstruction operations, the adaptive and decision-making challenges for tactical leaders have grown tremendously with increased complexity of operational environments and range of military operations (Chait et al., 2006; 2007)
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From page 28... ...
are appropriate for combined arms maneuver, while stability mechanisms are best suited for wide area security.
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To make the TSU and Soldier decisive on the battlefield, capabilities are needed to enable TSUs and Soldiers not only to dominate opponents in lethal and nonlethal engagements but also to sustain other operations, including those with stability and humanitarian effects, for long periods of time before, during, and after such engagements. General capability enhancements are needed in areas of situational understanding, maneuverability, military effects, sustainability, and survivability as described below.
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From page 30... ...
The next five sections of this chapter explore the TSU and Soldier capabilities required in these missions and tasks by focusing on one capability area at a time: situational understanding, military effects, maneuverability, sustainability, and survivability. After that exploration of required capabilities, the committee discusses current capability weaknesses and opportunities, many of which cross over all or several of these capability areas, which the Army should address to ensure that future TSUs and Soldiers have decisive overmatch across the entire range of military operations.
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From page 31... ...
The Role of Decision-Making in Overmatch Deliberate decision-making is the process of identifying a problem to be solved, developing alternative courses of action for consideration, comparing anticipated outcomes of those courses of action, and selecting a course of action from that set for execution. It is critical to acknowledge that making decisions well is one, if not the, central goal for the dismounted Soldier and TSU with decisive overmatch.
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From page 32... ...
Three Levels of Situational Awareness Of particular importance to decision-making and execution from a perspective that addresses both the human and materiel dimensions is the need for personal and shared situational understanding (also called enhanced situational awareness)
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From page 33... ...
Coordination and communication among the Soldiers within a TSU or between TSUs engaged in a shared mission or task typically require and add to Level 2 and 3 situational awareness, thereby increasing situational understanding. Network Integration Currently, when a TSU leaves a forward operating base (FOB)
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From page 34... ...
To provide the TSU and individual Soldier these enhanced capabilities, advances are needed in communications, information, and socio-cognitive networks. Communications Networks Communications at the TSU level -- among the Soldiers in the TSU, with robotic systems within their operational environment (systems either organic to the TSU or attached to higher echelons)
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TSUs and Soldiers would benefit from advances in dynamic information networks that enhance information exchange and information assessment capabilities. Technologies and procedures are needed to ensure TSUs have access to information networks.
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Access to such tools will enable better situational understanding of the human terrain. In combat situations, these networks should support the Soldier's and TSU's ability to rapidly shape the operational environment before engagements by exploiting every aspect of the populace for its advantage in decreasing the threat from noncombatants, including minimizing collateral damage or loss of noncombatants.
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From page 37... ...
Over the past 10 years, the Army's engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the importance of the dismounted Soldier in unified land operations. These engagements have also highlighted the many shortcomings that still exist in making the Soldier dominant (giving the Soldier decisive overmatch)
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From page 38... ...
Army, 1992. To be decisive in stability and other operations short of deadly combat, dismounted TSUs also need less-than-lethal alternatives to lethal weapons.
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Actions that require enhanced cultural awareness. For situational understanding of the needs and perspectives of the local populace, an increased cultural awareness is needed by both Soldiers and TSUs, so as not to commit, for instance, a faux pas that negates weeks or even months of hard work in winning the support of the local populace.
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From page 40... ...
. At the dismounted TSU level, as well as at the theater-wide level of Army operations, socioeconomic support capability includes actions that build capacity of social and economic institutions so they may withstand and diminish threats such as those identified above under "security." Examples of this capability include establishing governing institutions, improving the existing transportation infrastructure, providing basic needs (water, electricity, sewage, etc.)
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From page 41... ...
This study, unlike the earlier studies, examines the needs for power and energy within the overall context of ensuring that dismounted TSUs have decisive overmatch through superior capabilities in the areas of situational understanding, military effects , maneuverability, supportability, and survivability. Why Energy is a Problem The focus of this study is the individual solider and how to make him/her overwhelmingly superior to any adversary.
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From page 42... ...
In any case, it requires expenditure of energy to construct suitable energy storage devices that dismounted Soldier will use in addition to requiring energy to transport resupply to them. These expenditures translate to monetary costs to produce energy storage units, transport the units to the Soldier, and store them in theater.
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From page 43... ...
SURVIVABILITY Survivability includes needs related to protection, which runs the gamut from individual Soldier protection to small-unit force protection to layers of protection external to the TSU. For both TSU and individual Soldier protection; there is insufficient force protection to ensure the highest degree of survivability across the entire range of military operations.
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From page 44... ...
The best protection against a kinetic injury event is to prevent the event from occurring at all. Capability enhancements in sensing, individual situational awareness, and shared situational awareness can prevent the TSU from being surprised and allow it to maintain the initiative.
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Enhanced shared situational awareness (unitlevel situational understanding) is one example, and it can be enabled with network improvements described in the Materiel Dimension section below.
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From page 46... ...
CURRENT OPERATIONAL WEAKNESSES Weaknesses in current dismounted Soldier operations provide insights into ways that the decisiveness of the TSU and individual Soldier can be increased. Following are examples of current capability weaknesses in dismounted TSU operations that were identified during committee member interactions with troops and officers in units recently returned from deployment.7 Once a TSU leaves the FOB or a vehicle, its access to tactical and socio cognitive information is severely limited.
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From page 47... ...
Performance Degradation Factors Second only to unit design in maximizing TSU performance is the physiological performance of TSU members. Significant ongoing Army research suggests that squad members during recent deployments were often operating at 8 The strategic corporal is the notion that leadership in complex, rapidly evolving mission environments devolves lower and lower down the chain of command to better exploit time-critical information in the decision-making process, ultimately landing on the corporal, the lowest ranking noncommissioned officer, 47
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From page 48... ...
Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, also at Natick, research staff described surveys and casualty analyses that indicate warfighters in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom have been hampered by suboptimum nutrition; progressive, chronic musculoskeletal injuries; and altitude and heat stresses. 10 COL Gaston P
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From page 49... ...
The mix of personalities, the experience of squad members, the network of trust, the resiliency of individual Soldiers, and the number of individuals within the squad have at least as much effect on operational effectiveness as does the hardware these individuals carry into the operational environment. But in fact, the effects of each of these critical features on performance are largely unknown and unstudied.
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From page 50... ...
If there were compelling evidence of a major increase in effectiveness, then one fundamental way to give dismounted TSUs decisive overmatch would be to upgrade their rank and expertise distributions.
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From page 51... ...
Training and Leader Development The fundamental priority in training is establishing the deliberate and systematic engineering and management that exploits available training technologies and facilities to elevate the TSU's performance to robust deployment readiness levels required of new operational environments. Were such engineering and management of the training enterprise attained, it would then be reasonable to consider, for the longer term, further advances in training technologies Attaining and maintaining excellent performance by a TSU requires intense, focused training and effective leader development.
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From page 52... ...
Buildings in training exercises are normally constructed of long-term durable materials such as cinder block walls. This limits use of training with future "see through walls" sensors for building materials more likely to be encountered in operational environments.
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From page 53... ...
While it has not been demonstrated that these limitations result in negative training, they make it likely that Soldiers will learn to "game" the training environment, which could result in learning behaviors that succeed in the live training exercise but would fail in actual combat situations. In addition to issues of realism, fixed physical training sites are expensive to build and populate with live role-players.
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From page 54... ...
High costs drive down the number of systems that can be procured. Deficits in the Analytical Foundation for Building Decisive TSUs The lack of an analytical foundation for rifle squad performance limits advances to what is being advocated at the moment by infantry leadership.
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From page 55... ...
The prevailing Army human dimension approach is to focus on the cognitive and physical performance of TSUs and Soldiers, however that view is dwarfed by the actual complexities of individual Soldiers and human interactions in teams.13 The "human dimension" programs in today's Army consist of underfunded R&D in the Army Research Laboratory, the Army Research Institute, and the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, plus unfunded, ad hoc, or "interest" activities in TRADOC, the United States Army Forces Command, and the United States Military Academy.
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From page 56... ...
2003. The Modern Warrior's Combat Load, Dismounted Operations in Afghanistan April - May 2003, Task Force Devil, Coalition Task Force 82, Coalition Joint Task Force 180, OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM III.
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From page 57... ...
1997. Energy-Efficient Technologies for the Dismounted Soldier.
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