Battlefield information glut not always useful to soldiers.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

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.

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