Science and Technology for Army Homeland Security: Report 1 (2003)

In general, attribution is assigning a cause or source to an act or event. In the context of this report, it is the identification of individuals or organizations that are responsible for direct or indirect acts of terrorism and sabotage directed against the United States, its territories, and vital national interests, and those that support them. Attribution is dominated by operations that identify those responsible; their tactics, techniques, and procedures; their equipment, materiel, and logistics; and their operational locations.

Retaliation is action taken in return for an injury or offense and future deterrence. For this report, it is defined as those operations that are focused on capturing, killing, and eliminating those individuals, organizations, their supporters, and their operational ability to conduct acts of terrorism and sabotage directed against the United States, its territories, and vital national interests. Additionally, these operations aim to create effects and demonstrate consequences that will deter other groups that might plan such attacks and to bring any such perpetrators or their supporting agencies, organizations, or foreign governments to justice.

The Army’s role in homeland security (HLS), antiterrorism (AT), and counterterrorism (CT) is addressed specifically in Chapter 1. The tasks include the following:

• Force protection of soldiers, families, and installations;

• Operations in support of the lead federal agency or state in case of a large-scale conventional or weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attack; and

• Operations in support of Joint Military Operations.

The Army’s particular role in attribution is very limited, both at home and in host nations. The intelligence community, whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the other less well known agencies, will make the attribution. The Army’s role is primarily that of support, either providing perimeter security and crime scene protection or providing analytical support from one of the Army’s premier technical labs.

In contrast, the Army’s role in retaliation runs the gamut from simple military/law enforcement coordination in the United States, when appropriate, to full-blown remote combat operations overseas, where the Army may be assigned primary responsibility for ground retaliation. Since this role is a primary one for the Army, the committee believes there are some enabling technologies that should receive very high priority and deserve S&T investment.

Because the potential range of response is so broad, the committee feels it would be most useful to focus on three limited areas that present very difficult technical challenges and where S&T can act as a force multiplier:

• Remote operations in an urban environment, with focus on mobility and survivability,

• Situational awareness in urban environments, and

• Terrorist surveillance in difficult environments, both urban and rugged¹ terrain.

As mentioned above, the committee believes that technology can be extremely useful to the Army in urban operations. In particular, technology can enhance mobility, survivability, and precision fire support.

• Mobility. Moving quickly in a crowded city swarming with civilians and hiding some terrorist cells is an extremely complicated task. This

problem was clearly demonstrated in Somalia. The Army must be able to move personnel quickly, through or over busy streets, on a safe, survivable platform. There is a need for small, armor-plated, light transport vehicles, ground and helicopter, to move forces as needed in this environment. Additionally, the capability is needed to clear obstacles in the streets and alleyways.

• Survivability. There are several aspects to the survivability problem. One key aspect is signature reduction of our forces across the spectrum—radio frequency (RF), electro-optical, infrared, radar, acoustic, etc. Success here could have a major impact on survivability. Additionally, enhanced armor protection is a must. Investment in very light but immensely strong armor can make a big difference and ought to be funded accordingly. This is also of critical importance in the Objective Force Warrior program (U.S. Army, 2002).

• Fire support. Fire support plays a critical role in all combat operations. Most current fire-support systems were not developed specifically for urban warfare, where precision and lethality (or nonlethality) are significant factors in the outcome of an operation. Even relatively small errors can be devastating in terms of collateral damage or innocent civilians killed. Continued development of precision munitions and adaptations of all fire-support weapons with both Global Positioning System (GPS) and GPS-type tracking is a must. Additionally, the issue of lethality must be addressed.

Often, traditional means of fire support can be used effectively in urban combat. However, even with more precision, fire support from systems such as AC 130 gunships, AH 64 attack helicopters, and artillery may not provide the immediate dedicated and more delicate support required by troops on the ground. In urban combat, the right tool may be a tack hammer, not a sledgehammer. The Army S&T program should explore concepts such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned ground vehicles (or both) that can loiter one block away and be called forward by the ground commander when needed. They can provide not only lethal but also nonlethal support in the form of concussion grenades, incapacitating agents, or psychological operations products.

The current system for gaining situational awareness in an urban environment is inadequate. This is due to the extremely complex RF propagation environment in such a setting, coupled with the high-resolution accuracy needed to track a soldier in a specific room or building. A comprehensive situational awareness system is needed. Building on the current Land Warrior system (U.S. Army, 2002), such a system would link the individual soldier to on-the-body, local, and remote sensor systems and information databases.

Elements of such a situational awareness system need to include:

• High-resolution blue force (friendly) tracking.² Current systems have inadequate resolution and are unable to exactly locate the individual soldier inside a building or a room due to the complex RF environment and lack of resolution of the GPS system. What is needed is a more complex system relying on GPS, a local RF system, and an accurate dead-reckoning system.

• Surveillance sensors.^3,4.5 There is no sufficiently lightweight, robust, multi-sensor, low-power, low-bandwidth sensor system. Such a system should provide information (and video imagery) to soldiers both as trig-

gered by enemy activity and as requested by the soldier. It should include several sensor phenomenologies, to wit: infrared, low-light-level visible, acoustic, seismic, chemical, and biological. Additionally, it should include advanced sensor fusion algorithms that provide composite automatic target recognition and identification systems, and, to reduce the workload on an operator, it should include alternatives to current video systems that rely on pan-tilt-zoom capability (such as panoramic systems). Lastly, it should include sensors that can monitor tunnels and locate booby-traps.

• Information databases. Systems should provide access to archival information about the urban environment, including: (1) building structures, (2) street maps, (3) the transportation network, (4) weather data, and (5) blueprints for individual major buildings.

• Red force (enemy) information processing and fusion. The intelligence officer can be and will be quickly overloaded with an abundance of red force spot reports. The system needs tracking/deconfliction algorithms, which would allow for the detection of intruders, tracking, recognition (uniform and face recognition techniques), and time/space correlation of intrusion events to determine size and activity.

• Red force location/tracking.⁶ The current capability is very limited. Such advances as cellular phone intercept and tracking and through-wall sensing (RF and acoustic) would help significantly if they can be made small, lightweight, inexpensive, and effective.

• Health monitoring system. There is a need to monitor the key parameters of individual soldiers’ health, such as body core temperature, hydration level, heart rate, biological and chemical exposure levels, and wound location and severity, utilizing a system like the one being developed by the Army Institute of Environmental Medicine (U.S. Army, undated). Additionally, predictive models of human stress failure points as a function of measured parameters would be useful for the commander.

Locating and tracking small terrorist cells in a rural environment is a very difficult task, particularly when the terrorists attempt to blend into the environment. This is the detection issue addressed in Chapter 2: technically speaking, a very small signal against a large background. Several advanced technologies may help the war fighter locate terrorists in this environment:

• Advanced unattended ground sensors (UGS).⁷ Remotely replaceable, power efficient, multisensor unattended ground systems will allow the war fighter to gather data and monitor critical locations, such as a cross-road, transportation junctions, critical building and gathering sites, etc. These systems must be covert, remotely enplaceable (perhaps robotically), preferably redeployable, and able to run in low-power mode until keyed by some event. They should have the ability to be integrated into, and cued by, a higher echelon information system that uses airborne and spaceborne assets, one element of the emerging network-centric warfare system.

• Multipayload, multisensor UAV surveillance system.⁸ A (preferably) covert UAV system can be rapidly deployed for surveillance in areas of interest. The payload should be multiple sensors able to detect covered and concealed targets. Power, size, and weight issues are paramount. Sensor fusion algorithms are necessary. They should include foliage penetration (FOLPEN) systems. Such a system will be fairly challenging technically, given the weight, power, and size needed to provide effective

coverage over a large area. False-alarm reduction will be a significant challenge.

However, as discussed in Chapter 2, there may well be a physical limitation to detector capability. The committee suggests the following approach in this case: First, look at increasing sensor sensitivity. Where that does not provide sufficient gain, look at networking lower cost, distributed sensors to cover a broad area. Where that is not sufficient, look at fusing disparate sensors such as ground sensors and airborne sensors to increase sensitivity. Where that doesn’t work, look at information fusion, i.e., combine results from different sources such as human intelligence reports, abnormal activity (heavy traffic or unfamiliar vehicles), overhead assets, and local sensors.

In this section, the committee summarizes the general functionalities associated with the Army’s role in attribution and retaliation and lists the technologies that could support their accomplishments seen by the committee (see Tables 5-1 and 5-2). The list is not meant to be all-inclusive. Moreover, the priorities are somewhat subjective, reflecting, as they do, the opinions of the committee. They reflect the committee’s assessment of the importance of the specific task of accomplishing the Army’s mission and the importance of the technology to accomplishing the task. Consequently, where the Army role is secondary, as it is in almost all aspects of attribution, the priorities are at best medium. Where the Army has primacy, as it does in many aspects of retaliation, and where the technologies may provide a leap-ahead capability in accomplishing the tasks, the priorities are high. As discussed in Chapter 1, chemical and biological investments are managed at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level. Similarly, some-far term technologies that are high risk but high payoff are nominally the province of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Where the technology would primarily support first responders, the committee believes the Department of Homeland Security should be the lead agency.

The tables provide a collection of technologies that could be used during the attribution and retaliation phases. The availability column reflects the general

opinion of the committee, which is not meant to be a detailed evaluation. A more precise evaluation, including a risk assessment of the technology, would be the province of a follow-on study.

U.S. Army. Undated. Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring. Available online at <http://www.usariem.army.mil/wpsm/index.html>. Accessed January 13, 2003.

U.S. Army. 2002. United States Army Weapon Systems 2002. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office.