Improving Video Reconnaissance in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): The Key to the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT)

Brent M. Eastwood, PhD (2002)

The phone jolted the division commander awake. He knew they would soon tell him to check the computer by his bed. He could not help smiling as he clicked the mouse. He remembered the days when G-2 meant endless satellite photos, now they just tell him to use the computer in his bedroom. He selected the icon Situational Template from the Threat Estimate bin. The Windows Media Player flashed and the commander frowned. The enemy mechanized task force was moving in battle formation. The short, concise video clip flickered on the screen. It clearly unveiled the enemys strength and composition. He could see their vehicles moving with a purpose. The commander clicked on Terrain Analysis for a new video clip. He studied the ground and looked for two or more likely avenues of approach. The key terrain looked like it was on the forward slope. Hed seen enough for now. Those two short clips had given him precious initial information. How old are these? he asked his G-3. About thirty minutes, Sir. Well get another fly-by soon from the Hunter UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). You can watch that in real time. The G-2 and I thought these clips would paint you a better picture for the moment. The IBCT (Interim Brigade Command Team) Commander is already moving. His staff put the clips together. Yeah. Well thats great, but we still have a lot of work to do. Im drawing up a concept sketch on the whiteboard now

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) with movie clips on a PC? Video that gives friendly forces a huge temporal advantage over the enemy? Digital information that enhances situational understanding for the ground commander? Sounds like something from the 2040 Objective Force, right? It may sound futuristic, but it is not that far off. In fact, a Hunter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) unit supporting an Interim Brig ade Combat Team (IBCT), division, or corps could help make the previous scenario a reality. And we could easily do it RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

US Army Colonel Michael K. Mehaffey, director of TRADOCs Battle Lab Integration and Technology Directorate, writes about the UAVs intended reconnaissance role in the IBCT. (It) supports situational understanding. It empowers the IBCT to anticipate, forestall and dominate threats, ensuring mission accomplishment through freedom of maneuver and decisive action (Mehaffey, 2000). The Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RSTA) squadron is designed to be the IBCTs cavalry. In turn, the success of the RSTA squadron depends on the UAV. Without it, the IBCT is easily surprised, outmaneuvered, and outgunned. The UAV theoretically gives the IBCT commander a huge technological advantage over the enemy in the close fight. However, the Army faces a serious challenge with its plans for the UAV and the Objective Force. Individual soldier expertise and operator specialization has not caught up to some of the more specific technology. Soldiers remain the keystone of the Objective Force. Without the ingenuity, determination, professionalism, and inspiration of the American soldier, the Objective Force is just a lifeless concept, writes US Army Lt. Colonel Robert Leonhard. The training and technology is not beyond the skills of our soldiers, but there appears to be problems with the way the information from the UAV is disseminated, analyzed, and archived; particularly information from its video reconnaissance capability. To fix this, the Army should consider providing a process that compresses near real-time video to smaller clips that can be easier synthesized and analyzed. This video system could then be married to other technological innovations in the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) area of the IBCT. The Army could then take this evolutionary step to help achieve digital-based situational awareness and understanding.

There are lessons to be learned before we achieve this state. If we use complaints and observations from past AARs as a yardstick, it appears the ground commander at the operational and tactical level is not getting the NRT video properly disseminated to him from the UAV. And if we judge from reports from the 1999 Balkan air war, most of the video seems to be staying at the strategic level. If the operational and tactical commander is in fact getting the NRT video, he seems to be getting it raw and unfiltered. Does this type of video always facilitate the best IPB and mission planning? For example, would you brief every single still image taken on a satellite pass? Why then would you show raw, unedited live video?

Brig. General James A. Marks, Commander, US Army Intelligence Center, writes, Your analysis should scratch your boss itchnot scratch yours. Remember, know your boss; answer his/her priority intelligence requirements (PIR). This is his/her read of the enemy, not yours. Intelligence is for the Commander! (Marks, 2002). A live video feed is often a good thing. It gives an immediate picture of the battlefield. But just because it is real time does not always give it intelligence value. To be truly effective, recon video must also be synthesized and analyzed-- just like still recon imagery. Based on the examples I have found, this process appears to be difficult in the current UAV configuration. Army CPT Leonel Nascimento deployed to Macedonia in 1999 in support of Operation Allied Force as an operations officer with a UAV Company. He found that intelligence dissemination from the UAV system produced some challenges. For the UAV video system to work, it must be connected to some kind of dissemination system. There are two possibilities. The UAV can be hooked up to a Remote Video Terminal (RVT), allowing a ground commander to watch in real time. Theoretically this is best, but the terminals range is limited to 40km, and

CPT Nascimentos unit decided not to use it in Macedonia. 40km was unacceptable in that AO, because the Hunter has a range of over 200km. The range limitations of the RVT seemed to hamstring the aircraft in Macedonia. If the system still has range issues, what does that mean for the IBCT? Remember, the success of the IBCT depends on a recon squadrons UAV operating far ahead of the main body. Will the RVT work then? Will the Hunter UAV be restricted by range in the IBCT? The UAV can also be hooked to the Trojan Spirit (TS II), the Armys main secure intelligence platform. However, CPT Nascimento says the TS II could not provide sufficient resolution to support imagery analysis. Plus, not everybody has access to the Trojan Spirit II system in the first place. So in 1999, it appeared the Hunter UAV system had already experienced serious flaws in its main two dissemination options for video. And personnel involved with the most recent FTX involving the RSTA and the UAV experienced challenges with the Remote Video Terminals. Again, what does this mean for the IBCT? Will the video get disseminated? Will the UAV help the IBCT commander achieve situational awareness and understanding? To remedy these dissemination issues, CPT Nascimento found the Pentagons Global Broadcast Service (GBS), also called the Joint Broadcast System (JBS), to be a better outlet to distribute the images from his birds. The JBS seems like it works very well, much like a Direct TV consumer satellite dish. It is a push-pull system. You have to know what you are looking for to be able to pull the right video off the satellite. That would appear to be good for analysts at the Pentagon, not good for commanders in the field. There seems to be other problems with putting live, uncut feeds of military operations on satellite. First, it allows for micromanaging and second-guessing from people far removed from the battlefield. (Ripley, 1999)

Second, the video is just too raw. Think of it like watching sports on TV. Even if you are a huge golf fan, do you really want to watch six hours of golf? Would you rather see a few seconds of highlights that really tell the story? Third, the IBCT commanders and their staffs need video in a form they can handle. An 8-hour raw tape with little activity or motion does not always paint that critical, initial picture for the commander. And what about the other extreme? What if the feed has too much action and nobody can make any sense of it? It might help if the UAV video was filtered or edited somehow-- which again brings us back to the issues of synthesis and analysis. And finally, how do you show it? Piping an unfiltered feed to the TOC is like watching a foreign film with no dubbing or subtitles. Nobody understands it, but everybody thinks they can critique it. Battlefield video really needs the background and context from someone like an image analyst, or it just becomes video wallpaper. With all these problems in mind, we may need to consider some kind of alternative. Therefore, the best solution is to condense raw battlefield video to more digestible, bite-size nuggets. This will help IPB, mission analysis and planning, and solve a lot of other related issues. So how do we do this? In its current configuration, the ground commander theoretically gets continuous assessment from the UAV. In reality, it seems the commander gets continuous video that can be hard to view and interpret. How can we change this raw video to something we can handleto video clips that can be displayed or sent by e-mail on a Force XXI-like Intranet? (For arguments sake, lets envision a 100% secure server.) And can we perform this civilian-world technology in the Army? In January 2001, while a ROTC cadet, I was tasked with a project at West Virginia University called Stream of the Week. My civilian boss told me to produce a 1-2 minute news

story and convert the video to streaming form on the Universitys main web page http://www.wvu.edu. The university said we would be one of the only schools in the nation with streaming web video on its home page. This civilian project has the potential to form the backbone of a system that could help improve the UAVs video reconnaissance capability. The process looks like this: Acquire video digitally; use a camera that records on digital video cassettes. Edit NRT video into clips with a non-linear or whitebox desktop system. Use compression software to shrink the video. Disseminate clips through a secure intranet. Archive clips for further analysis. Use existing software (Powerpoint) for presentation.

Thankfully, there is good news on these technological developments. The Army has already tested a system very similar to mine. It is called the Multimedia Analysis and Archive System (MAAS) which were developed last year by the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), Defense Information Technology Testbed (DITT) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It is basically the same idea. A video broadcast is digitized and encoded in real time. The digitized portion of the video is immediately available to the analyst for exploitation even during the encoding and digitization of the continuing video broadcast. The video broadcast of a UAV mission is an example of the need to digitize and encode a video broadcast in real time and exploit the digital data immediately (Kinsey & Hickok, 2001). It gets even better. MAAS supports all kinds of digital and analog tape formats. The analysis capability also allows the tactical analyst to produce contemporary products derived from the data contained within the information server. These analysis products are created with formats such as MPEG1 video, JPEG and GIFF images, documents

in HTML, Word, or Powerpoint formats. The analysis products can be distributed through the Information Server, Web Server, or CD-ROM (Kinsey & Hickok, 2001). It is just going to take strong leadership to marry the technology of the UAV, RSTA, and MAAS together. Thus, the successful employment of these converging innovations becomes one of the keys to the IBCT. Obviously, the crucial concern for the ground commander remains immediacy of the video. There are certain situations, depending on METT -T and the commanders leadership style, where immediate NRT video is necessary. A video clip that is edited to perfection may come too little and too late for the commander. The ideal video reconnaissance system should also be flexible enough to toggle between NRT and video clips, especially at the tactical level. So if we go back to our scenario at the beginning of this article, the Division G-2 and G3 would check the clips they got from the IBCT in the field. They would pick out battlefield images that would paint the best picture for their commander. Their staffs would then touch up the highlight film for their boss. Meanwhile, they also compress and encode new, updated clips, which are constantly streaming in. They do the OPORDER on Powerpoint with up-tothe-minute video clips from the IBCT. The G-2 guys at Corps get a copy of the files for their archives, for example: Initial Movement of Red Force Mechanized Task Force. They compare it to similar clips on their database and work on an enemy doctrinal template. But its not just the G-2 section that benefits. The G-3 staff now has their hair on fire with this information, and as a result, the ball gets rolling much quicker for mission planning. They have the commanders intent already sketched on the whiteboard, -- a software tool that lets a commander draw a concept sketch which gets sent digitally to all staff members (Dostal,

2001). They understand their task and purpose fully because they already helped put the initial picture together. The IBCT commander in the field is way ahead of all this activity at division. He can choose between video clips and real-time video. He has already gotten updated information, his MDMP is quicker, and his staff is looking to the future instead of scratching their heads over the past. They combine situational understanding with collaborative planning just like TRADOCs Army Battle Command System (ABCS) envisions.

I am a future Infantry officer. I want everybody to be combat ready. I want better, quicker information than the enemy, so I can outmaneuver and defeat him. The Army has an incredible technological advantage with its Hunter UAV system. We should consider the technique of encoding and compressing video clipstechniques that may help paint a more effective picture for the ground commander. This video format could also make it easier for intelligence analysts to do their jobs. Of course, it is no substitute for getting your own eyes, ears, and nose on the ground! UAVs are just tools for ISR and not the panacea. Adopting and executing the kinds of ideas I have outlined requires forward-thinking leadership that is unafraid of ugly facts. General George C. Marshall pondered similar issues during the transformation of the Army and the evolution of technology in World War II. The successful Army of today is composed of specialists, thoroughly trained, and above all, organized into a perfect team. Today, it is imperative that cold factual analysis prevails over enthusiastic emotional outbursts. Sentiment must submit to common sense.

Thus, the commander who is armed with these sensibilities and an appreciation of history, who knows how to use the tools of evolutionary technology, will become the successful warrior of the information age.

The author wishes to thank Lt. Col. Robert Leonhard for his guidance and support.

Works Cited

Dostal, Major Brad C. US Army. Enhancing Situational Understanding through the Employment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Center for Army Lessons Learned Newsletter, Updated Sep, 01. Kinsey, William and Hickok, Gene. Multimedia Analysis and Archive System (MAAS) Defense Information Technology Testbed (DITT), Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. National Technology Alliance, National Media Laboratory, St. Paul, Minnesota. Apr, 01 Leonhard, Lt. Colonel Robert, US Army. The Transformation of the United States Army. Mehaffey, Colonel Michael, US Army. Vanguard of the Objective Force, Military Review, Sep/Oct 00. Marks, Brig. General James A., US Army. Always Out Front. Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Jan. to Mar. 02. Nascimento, Captain Leonel, US Army. UAV Lessons Learned from OPERATION ALLIED FORCE, Center for Army Lessons Learned, Jan/Feb 00. Ripley, Tim. UAVs over Kosovo-Did the Earth Move? Defense Systems Daily, Dec. 99. Stoler, Mark. George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1989. TRADOC Program Integration Office-Army Battle Command System. C4ISR Vision Slide Presentation.