Reinventing the Foot Soldier; The American military wants to bring a vast range of battlefield knowledge down to the grunts on the ground.(Cover Story)

Byline: Adam Piore

Iraqi soldiers had a name for America's fleet of M1 Abrams tanks--they called them "whispering death." That's because the M1 can obliterate the kind of Soviet-era tanks employed by the former Iraqi Army before a crew even knows it's coming. It's not just that these 63-ton killing machines have heat-sensitive thermal imaging that allows U.S. soldiers to see tanks hiding behind sand dunes at night in any weather, or that its weapons have a 1,000-meter advantage in range. The M1's superiority has as much to do with a revolution in wireless technology that's transformed the way U.S. forces manage their operations on the battlefield. Using GPS navigation, American tanks roam the desert without fear of getting lost. Low-flying drones transmit real-time video from the battlefield back to headquarters, where commanders help tank crews prepare for what lies ahead. This technological advantage is one reason why the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq was so quick and deadly.

It also helps explain why American forces have had such trouble fighting the ensuing insurgency, when soldiers have had to get out of their tanks and go after enemy fighters on foot. That's raised one of the most pressing problems facing the U.S. military: how to bring the benefits of the wireless revolution down to the individual foot soldier. The Pentagon has scores of new projects in testing and development aimed at doing just that. Their goal is to endow the grunt with the ability to see enemy soldiers before he emerges from the protection of his armored vehicle. On the streets, he'll have access to real-time video of what lies ahead, controlling perspective and location with a joystick that can manipulate a "virtual" image of himself across a portable video screen attached to his helmet. "Think about what you could do differently if you knew that an adversary was waiting around a corner," Jeffrey Paul, of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), told a crowd of scientists and defense contractors recently. "You could decide whether to prepare for combat, signal others to surprise him or choose a different route. That advance knowledge is what we must give our war fighters."

To do this, the military will need to continue making significant strides in the amount of real-time, actionable data it can collect from the battlefield. In the second gulf war Americans used a crude new tracking system that allowed tank commanders to identify one another by locating them on a real-time graphical display of the battlefield. The advance cut down significantly on friendly fire incidents. But the ultimate goal is much more ambitious. Pentagon planners see a day when they can blanket battlefields with so many wireless sensors that even the smallest targets in the most complex urban or jungle environments will be unable to change position without being observed. "This means there will always be an appropriate sensor staring in our opponent's face no matter where they move," ...