Vikram Mittal
Quite simply, future wars will be decided through battles in the cyber domain. This forecast was best illustrated in the 1996 film Independence Day, where a war between humans and aliens ended with a cyber-attack on the alien systems. However, a forgettable scene earlier in the film depicted a potentially more powerful cyber weapon. In this overlooked scene, Jeff Goldblum uses his ex-wife’s cellphone signal to determine her position in the White House.
The importance of this cyber weapon stems from another aspect of future wars – they will always require ground forces to find and destroy their adversaries in close combat. As such, cyber technology will soon enter into the arsenal of weapons available to conventional soldiers. The signal triangulation capability depicted in Independence Day has the potential to provide soldiers a much-needed tactical edge in combat.
Signal triangulation will allow soldiers to detect their enemies more rapidly, which is critical in ground combat. The rules of ground combat are rather simple. A soldier wins if they shoot the enemy before being shot. And whichever side detects their adversary first, gets to shoot first.
The technology for signal triangulation is very well established. Indeed, in World War II, signal triangulation was used to identify locations of enemy aircraft and submarines. At its most basic level, signal triangulation uses a directional antenna to determine the direction to a radio emitter. When this measurement is repeated from at least three different positions, the vectors from the antennae to the source intersect at the location of the source in 3-dimensional space.
A simple schematic for signal triangulation. Three soldiers (green) carry directional antennae that ... [+] VIKRAM MITTAL
Although the signal triangulation process is straightforward, there are still two large technical challenges that remain. The first challenge relates to the large amount of processing power required for the triangulation algorithms. The second challenge relates to how to provide the information to the soldier without distracting or overwhelming them. Researchers across the Army, including the Army Cyber Institute, are working on solutions for these two challenges with the Augmented Reality for Radio Frequency Visualization (ARRFVIS) project.
The first issue stems from modern military radios using encryption and frequency hopping to avoid signal detection and triangulation. Although algorithms are available to overcome these countermeasures, they require collecting and analyzing radio frequencies over a large spectrum. The associated processing requires significant computing power, often more than what is reasonable for a soldier to carry.
However, advances in cloud computing provide an opportunity to allow for a soldier to have the requisite processing power. Individual soldiers (or drones!) will carry antennae that collect the radio frequency signals in an area. The signals will be pre-processed and passed to the cloud for processing. Cloud computing would collect the data from a number of different collectors and process it to localize the origin point of an enemy radio signal. The soldier would then be returned the coordinates of the radio emitter.
The second technical challenge relates to how the soldier could actually use the coordinates of the radio emitter. Traditionally, they could plot these coordinates on a map, and then calculate distance and azimuth to the enemy. This process can be automated through the tablets that soldiers are currently issued such as Nett Warrior or Android Team Awareness Kit. These tablets provide a “moving map” that plots their location, locations of other friendly units, and probable enemy locations. However, even with the tablet, the soldier will require significant time to translate a 2D map to the real world. During this time, the soldier would be particularly vulnerable, as their head will be looking down at a screen, and one of their hands will be off their rifle.
These issues can be resolved through advances in Augmented Reality (AR) systems, which overlay translucent graphics onto a wearer’s field of view. The most widespread AR system is the Microsoft MSFT -1% Hololens, which has achieved some commercial success, and is currently being militarized for the Army. The ARRFVIS system combines AR with signal triangulation to allow for a small marker, such as a red dot, to appear above the location of the radio in the soldier’s field of view. The soldier would not have to look down, nor would they have to convert a 2-dimensional map to the real-world. A soldier could simply look out into a crowd of people and determine who amongst them are carrying a radio on the enemy’s network. This capability would be a game-changing technology to the soldier, who would be able rapidly identify and engage their enemies.
Going forward, cyber weaponry will pervade into all facets of combat. In the near future, even soldiers at the lowest level will have access to the cyber arsenal. One cyber technology, the ARRFVIS system, which couples signal triangulation, cloud computing, and augmented reality, will provide a tactical edge to soldiers at the lowest levels of combat.
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