Newswise — In an age of sophisticated battlefield video games, where a single player can control dozens of tanks, aircraft, and other vehicles at a time, one might be forgiven for assuming that real-life soldiers have the same capability. They don't. At times, soldiers don't even know their own locations, shuffling through dozens of paper maps and peering at GPS devices. Nor do commanders have more than a general idea of where their various units are at any given time. In war rooms, troop positions are designated by pins stuck into maps, the accuracy dependent on how often units radio in their positions and how well they read their maps.
That all changed in Iraq, as Dr. Bruce T. Robinson of Mitre Corp. describes in the October 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. For the first time ever, any soldier, from a private driving a truck to the commanding general at the U.S. Army's headquarters in Kuwait, could watch on-screen as tanks, helicopters, and other vehicles moved across the battlefield. With this new satellite-based tracking technology--known, somewhat cumbersomely, as Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below, or FBCB2--they now had what military strategists have long considered the battlefield's Holy Grail: a common operational picture. That picture let everyone know what was happening as it happened, writes Robinson, who was one of the designers of the tracking network.
For soldiers in the field, FBCB2 allowed them to navigate even in blinding sandstorms, to coordinate attacks with unprecedented precision, and to exchange text messages on the fly. That last feature proved essential during the Army's now-famous race across the desert to Baghdad. Many units were moving so fast they fell out of radio range; nor could they rely on the Army's usual satellite-based communications networks, which take several days to set up and tune.
The FBCB2 also helped prevent friendly fire. Among those U.S. and allied forces units that had an FBCB2 device, the incidence of fratricide fell to zero.
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