Situational awareness
Knowing where your friends and enemies are
Working in a highly dynamic environment, maintaining situational awareness for mounted and dismounted troops is a fundamental aspect of operational success. SitaWare Frontline and SitaWare Edge are key tools in this – from mission planning and sharing data across networks, to deconflicting friendly and enemy assets in a contested environment.
Situational awareness can come in a variety of forms for mounted and dismounted forces. As plans change, the ability to share new information on positions and intentions becomes critical to understanding a complex battlespace. Being able to find and communicate with other units also helps with achieving common mission goals and ensuring battlefield safety. Similarly, as multinational and joint operations become more common, sharing and updating intelligence across units and coalitions is also imperative – with the SitaWare suite able to support interoperability easily.
Situational awareness is pivotal to the soldiers' safety and ability to carry out operations in the dismounted environment.
Click on the video below to hear our domain expert and former Captain in the Royal Danish Army, Jesper Annexgaard, explain how SitaWare Edge brings situational awareness to troops operating at the tip of the spear.
The battlefield is a dynamic environment, and the ability to change or rapidly create new plans is an important capability for those on the ground.
Letting those in higher echelons, as well as supporting units, know your new plans and intentions is an important facet of broader situational awareness.
Simplified sharing – such as creating plans and sharing adjustments via simple command layer sketches – significantly improve situational awareness while allowing operational flexibility and responsiveness. Plans can be shared through chat message attachments, and new intelligence on enemy dispositions added through ongoing map synchronisation.
SitaWare Edge continues to receive improvements from Systematic’s user experience specialists, allowing the technology to be used in a wide range of environments. This can range from enhanced screen responsiveness for gloved fingers, layer management, and the presentation of data, through to the communication of the plan over tactical data radios, LTE networks and HF radios, SATCOM systems, and more. These improvements allow troops on the ground to ensure they are accurately updating their plans and positions easily, helping to reduce the risk of fratricide.
As the SitaWare suite synchronises layers, the updated disposition of units helps mounted, dismounted, and headquarters users rapidly identify the locations of friendly units, understand their intentions, and helps with collaboration and deconfliction.
Whether you live in a crowded city, in a small village, or on a farm, in the modern world people are less likely to know who their neighbours are. The battlefield is no different, particularly as certain unit types can project their presence forward, and mobile units can quickly deploy from one position to another.
The SitaWare suite features a powerful search engine capability, allowing users to search for callsigns and then locating them on the map, or by specific symbol types. Users are then able to readily interact with these units through communication functions such as chat rooms to help facilitate the completion of a mission.
As the use of unmanned systems expands on the battlefield, knowing who is operating a system becomes a significant force protection issue. Knowing which system is friendly and which one is an enemy is an important part of ensuring your forces stay safe from attack and observation. Using SitaWare, video viewsheds from unmanned systems are displayed on the map when watching a video feed, and the track of the unmanned system can be broadcast as a friendly force track (FFT) on the map to help ensure ground forces can identify friendly systems. SitaWare users are also able to chat directly with an unmanned system’s operator, without having to go through an air-gapped hierarchy.
The SitaWare suite has intelligence sharing at its very core. Synchronised mapping allows users to share the locations of their own units, as well as identified enemy and civilian locations, seamlessly through a communications backbone with very high levels of redundancy.
One facet of this is the employment of communications and interoperability standards that allow users from a variety of forces to collaborate. This allows intelligence data to be seamlessly shared between a wide variety of sensor systems, ranging from ship-based radars to airborne sensor systems, thereby improving the awareness of the battlespace. Similarly, the ability to share data across a coalition helps to improve situational awareness, as units from a number of national forces can reduce the risk of fratricide and achieve common goals.
