The soldier is the "smartest" sensor on the battlefield, observed Lt. Col. Steve Iwicki (USA), deputy director of the U.S. Army's Task Force Actionable Intelligence. His task force is looking at "how do we connect the soldier to the network."

The Army plans to deploy a hand-held intelligence gathering and communication device that would allow each soldier to receive situational awareness information as well as transmit battlefield reports, Iwicki told NetDefense in an April 19 interview. "This would bridge the [information] gap ... Information goes directly to the soldier and the soldier's information goes directly to the enterprise."

Northrop Grumman has developed a prototype of the hand-held device, which would link up to the Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below-Blue Force Tracking (FBCB2-BFT) system. The company is supplying 100 of the devices to the Army for testing and evaluation this month, according to Gerrit LeGrand, business development manager at the company's Tactical Systems Division.

The device is a ruggedized, hand-held personal digital assistant that includes global positioning system navigation capability and an L-band satellite transceiver and operates on a Windows CE environment, he said. It runs on batteries that can be recharged through a vehicle mounting kit.

Based on experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has learned a number of lessons regarding the collection and dissemination of intelligence in four areas, Iwicki said.

First is tactical information collection. "We found that our ability to strike targets often exceeded our ability to collect [information] on them ... It's much harder to find the threat environment we are facing in Iraq today for the individuals and groups ... we have to go after versus if you were fighting an enemy tank division that has a very strong signature." The Army is adding more human intelligence teams to address that problem, he said.

The second area is battlefield reporting. Iwicki said that there are a lot of patrols and convoys collecting information "which never gets reported into the system." The Army's goal is to make "every soldier a sensor." The first piece of that effort is training soldiers to gather and report intelligence. "Their reporting will be seen as a combat multiplier as we go through operations," he said. The second piece is to teach leaders how to optimize their intelligence capabilities. A brigade commander needs to understand how to communicate his intelligence requirements down to the soldier level so that the soldier understands what the commander is looking for, he explained. The Army plans to begin training courses for the "every soldier a sensor" concept this summer.

A third area is access to national intelligence. "Oftentimes [access] is constrained by security policy that prevents us from getting the information down to the individual level," he said. Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army G2, is working with Stephen Cambone, principal deputy under secretary of defense (policy), to improve the national intelligence distribution process. The fourth area is networking analytical centers. "We don't have the best on-the-move communications that we need to keep the Army going in a real-time situational awareness," he said. The Army is implementing tactical overwatch, which allows the brigades and battalions to get periodic intelligence updates when they stop for refueling.