Experts weigh technologies to help identify friend and foe.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

A group of researchers from U.S. government laboratories and other organizations is evaluating technologies that would improve the military services' current capabilities to identify friendly and enemy combatants.

These experts, under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specifically are focusing on friend-or-foe ID technologies for the Army's Future Combat Systems. The group, called the FCS Integrated Support Team, or FIST, has been in place for more than a year and is evaluating technologies for various FCS applications.

"We help support the development and deployment of a combat ID notional architecture," said Glenn Allgood, a principal investigator at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who also is a member of the FIST group. "Our job is to be the honest brokers," he said in an interview.

The technologies being considered for combat ID systems are assessed based on their performance, maturity and cost Among them are lasers, millimeter-wave and radio-based combat ID systems. These technologies are mature enough to meet the FCS development schedule, Allgood explained. "We developed a notional architecture around that." Nevertheless, "we have to make sure that as we develop the notional architecture, that it doesn't preclude the use of other technologies in the future."

Radio Frequency tags, for example, "look very promising for air to ground" combat identification systems.

The FIST, Allgood said, recently developed a combat ID "fixed wing air to ground spec that is going to be used as our assessment guide to see how effective a proposed technology would be at supporting the combat ID needs for air to ground."

RF tags is one of the leading candidates. "The specs are just roiling out, so we are still conducting the analysis on RF Tags.... Developing these specs will allow any technology to be graded and compared as to its utility in this role.... The whole point of having the specs is to allow/provide competition."

Among the technical difficulties that historically have hampered combat ID systems is the ability to not just identify friend or foe, but also other categories in between. Today's battlefields have more than just allies and enemies, Allgood noted. There are...