Reality vs Perception: Cops and Soldiers

Last week, a Charlotte police officer shot and killed a man. The police say he was holding a gun; the man’s family and witnesses say he was holding a book. The body and dash cam footage released as of this weekend (Sunday, 25 Sept) does not provide the necessary angles to see what he had.

But here is the truth of the situation: the officer perceived a gun; the witnesses perceived a book. What we see and what we perceive (that is, how our brains translate what we see) are not the same thing. The brain processes information based on different cognitive biases, and fear and adrenaline further distance perception from reality. But often, we see what we expect to see.

Why does this matter to the Army? To the concept of “thinking like a soldier”?

Two weeks ago was the Maneuver Conference, where the focus of discussions was how the US would fare against a near-peer competitor, specifically Russia. During one of the presentations, a student in the Captains Career Course asked BG Daugherty, currently serving as Deputy Chief of Staff, G- 3, U.S. Army Europe, about the difficulty in distinguishing vehicles belonging to our allies versus the Russians, and the potential for fratricide. The answer was that the potential was high, because too many of our partners do not have Blue Force Tracking to be able to develop a common operating picture, but that with a lot of training, our soldiers would learn to recognize the difference, and that “visual discrimination” would be adequate for making decisions regarding whether to engage a potential target.

Ummm…. Well…. No….

In stressful situations (you know, like war, especially in the throes of a battle), what we see and what we perceive are not the same thing. So, even if soldiers could be trained to visually distinguish, for instance, Russian and Ukrainian military vehicles (some of which are produced in the same facility, and are actually the same vehicle), during times of crisis, they will all look the same. Soldiers will perceive a threat or an ally based on many things other than the “reality” of what they see, and this is not something that can be changed by training soldiers what the different vehicles look like.

After all, I can guarantee you that every person involved in the Charlotte incident can distinguish between a gun and book.

So what can be done?

The answer is two-fold, and training is part of it – but not as simplistic as “learning to visually distinguish”. The first part is a new, updated Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) system – one that does not rely on Blue Force Tracking, satellites, or a common operating picture, none of which works in a degraded environment. The second part is to fully incorporate that system’s use into the training environment.

In the 1990s, the Joint Combat Identification Panels – then called the Quick Fix Panels – were developed and deployed in under 18 months to prevent us from using our very lethal weapons on our own soldiers (or, more accurately, on their vehicles). My understanding is that the size and shape of the panels, which remain the only viable ground-based combat identification system (there are other systems available for planes and ships), cannot be used on our European partners’ vehicles due to their size and shape. Furthermore, the panels were called the Quick Fix because they were only supposed to be used for 2-3 years, with the developer assuming that our near-peer adversaries would be able to use them against us (as positive hostile identification) within that time period.

So, step one is a new IFF system. The system must be quick and easy-to-use, and a point-to-point system like the panels, so they continue to work even if satellite systems are unavailable. It must be available for all vehicles, not only the US platforms.

Step two is to train with this system. Soldiers who are making the fire/no-fire decisions must be experts at using the system, and have trained, to the point of muscle memory, how to do it and respond to the friend/foe distinction. Even then, there may be some perception issues, but this is the way to reduce it as much as possible.

Police officers do not get the benefit of using combat identification to differentiate bad guys; while fighting non-uniformed adversaries in Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2001, our soldiers haven’t either. But in a near-peer war, we not only can provide our soldiers with the capability, but we owe it to them to provide it and train to use it.

Especially in a world where someone is taping everything, and perception and reality are not the same, we owe it to our soldiers to provide them with an answer beyond “training”. As someone who believes in training, who believes that a soldier’s job, when not deployed, should be to train, it is vital that we understand the limitations of training, and base not only training, but also expectations and materiel development based on that understanding.

You can train muscle memory. You cannot train perception.

Dean Kamen, Innovation, and the Military

It will come as no surprise to anyone who even remotely follows the goings-on within the Defense Department that DoD and the Services all have a bit (or more than a bit) of a crush on Silicon Valley. In fact, it may be more than a crush: sometimes, it seems to border on obsession.

And why wouldn’t it? DoD used to be the leader in innovation; now, it can’t even remotely keep up. A 10+ year development and acquisition cycle versus Moore’s Law In Action (the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years – it is actually closer to 18 months now). Silicon Valley gets its pick of the top recruits from the top schools every year. Getting a job at Google is more competitive than getting accepted to HARVARD. Silicon Valley and “innovation” seem to be the buzzwords of the year at the Pentagon.

So I want you to imagine the following scene: Dean Kamen, inventor of many, many things, including the Segway, standing in front of an auditorium full of (mostly) Marines. This group has gathered for a meeting entitled Marine Corps Force Development 25 (FD25), and was meant to introduce more innovation into the process. Mr. Kamen was one of the keynotes, and kept the entire audience enthralled for his full allocated time – and then continued for another hour beyond that.

His company, Deka Research, is fairly small (about 500 employees). When large companies want to be innovative, they either bring him in to help “teach” them to be innovative (which he does not really think is possible in a large organization), or (more often), they hire him to do the innovative thinking/product development. He can do this: he is the sole owner of his company, and other than keeping employees paid, he has no obligations to outside parties. The company is not publicly traded, it has no shareholders, etc. And failure certainly does not come with a risk of “death”.

His bottom line: the military should not try to be innovative (as a whole). There is too much at risk. Slow, meticulous, planned, consistent. These words mean death in Silicon Valley; but for members of the military, they provide the best chance of long-term survival. There may be places for innovation within the services, but trying to emulate Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs is both impossible and impractical. And just plain not a good idea.

As the Army (and DoD) continues to focus on Silicon Valley, I hope they heed the words of one of the most prolific innovators and inventors of the past 50 years: proceed with caution, and do not risk lives in an attempt to be more like “them” on the West Coast.

New Year, New Blog

I’ve started this blog a number of times – and never followed through. This year, will be different. This year, I will work on this blog on a regular basis. Even if I only post for myself, I will post.