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How Defense Research Makes Troops More Effective
The Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor is a fighter aircraft that uses stealth technology. (Creative Commons Flickr.)
Walter Pincus | Washington Post
May 12, 2008
When Army patrol leaders in Iraq prepare to go out on missions in Baghdad, their last stop at headquarters is a computerized map on which they outline the area where they will operate. Then they watch as icons emerge, showing, in grim detail, the lurking dangers.
By clicking on those, they can bring up not only sites of past hostile action but also photos and background on local leaders – some to see and others to avoid – videos of hostile and safe places, and reports from previous patrols, says Brian Slaughter, a retired Army first lieutenant who served as an armored platoon leader in Iraq in 2004. Slaughter took part in developing the computerized Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR).
Before TIGR, patrol leaders had only intelligence passed down from higher commands, primarily the locations of previous attacks. “Soldiers love it,” Slaughter said. “TIGR picks up everything. Now they have their own tool at company level that pulls up a wealth of information that helps determine their safest route.”
When the troops return from patrols, they feed information back into the system, adding to the data available to the next patrol leader, he said.
The Boeing X-32 was a multi-purpose jet fighter in the Joint Strike Fighter contest.
Mari Maeda, a project manager for TIGR, said the system also allows departing units to transfer tactical information to their replacements. The changeover to new groups in the past required PowerPoint files, spreadsheets and many bound volumes of data, she said.
“Now, with TIGR, they can do a virtual tour of the neighborhoods,” Maeda said, and quickly pass along “15 months of knowledge.”
The TIGR software package is part of a networking technology developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that about 2,000 patrol leaders in Iraq are now using.
DARPA’s proposed $3.3 billion budget for fiscal 2009, now before Congress, is the largest in its history. Almost all DARPA projects are long-range efforts, and those that come to fruition often are not used by the military until years later. But some research initiated well before the Iraq war began was designed to be used in just the type of urban conflict that has emerged in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
