‘Fight recorder’ emergency beacons proposal for Australian soldiers raises safety concerns
A DEFENCE force call for troops to be fitted with ‘fight box’ data recorders has raised eyebrows among former soldiers concerned it could be exploited by an enemy.
A DEFENCE force call for troops to be fitted with ‘fight recorders’ has raised eyebrows among former soldiers concerned the data could be exploited by an enemy.
The concept is similar to the ‘black box’ flight data recorders fitted to commercial aircraft where key information — such as movements and communications — are stored for detailed analysis in the aftermath of any accident.
In the case of shot or injured soldiers, the Defence Department broadly says it wants to “capture the information required to reconstruct the event”.
“Battlefield threats are continually evolving with new and unconventional weapons and the ability to reconstruct incidents will provide vital insights necessary to improve the protective systems of the warfighter,” the call for research reads.
But executive director of the Australia Defence Association Neil James says the idea is fraught with technical, legal, operational — and moral — issues.
PANDORA’S BOX
The Defence Science Technology Group last week issued a call to industry and universities for research proposals detailing how such a concept could be turned into a ‘workable product’.
“The Fight Recorder is envisaged as a small, light and robust emergency beacon unobtrusively worn by the warfighter to capture the data required for meaningful incident investigation and provide first hand insight into the demands of military service in a deployed environment,” the call for expressions of interest reads.
Put simply, the defence force wants to find out what goes wrong on the battlefield.
Among the specified functionality of the ‘fight recorder’ is a beacon to make it easier for medics to find a wounded soldier.
“Battlefield casualty survival rates are closely tied to response time and to tailoring systems that can better mitigate emerging threats,” a government statement reads.
But a potential sting is in the tail.
Hitching a ride with the emergency signal — aimed at low-orbit satellites — will be records of “dozens of parameters collected several times per second” to recreate the movement of the soldier during the battle.
Former army intelligence officer Neil James warns both the transmission and the data itself could be of more use to the enemy than our own forces.
INFORMATION WARFARE
“If you can monitor the soldier, you can better take care of their health,” Mr James says. “Things like aerobic respiration, blood pressure, stress levels … this can all help in the long term for occupational health and safety, at least as much as it exists on a battlefield.”
But the very fact the fight recorder contains an emergency beacon could be an issue, he says.
“The problem with any emergency beacon is that anyone can read — and see — it.”
A key consideration in the deployment of such personal data recorders and transmitters would need to be the type of warfare the soldier was engaged in.
“Is it a counterinsurgency operation or conventional confrontation? Is the fighting in a jungle, a desert or a city? There’s no hard and fast rule. You may be able to use it in some situations, but not others,” Mr James says.
“Even in a low-intensity war, a lot of modern detection and intercept technology is easily available. Commercial equipment can be bought by even terrorist units to exploit such data.”
Even if it remains encrypted, he says, the very nature of a transmission is revealing.
“You can read the flow of it,” he said. “Let’s say that in a surprise attack the enemy picks up 100 data flows from a certain location. From this they can infer the size and type of the force — even if they cannot read the data — and what it is doing.
“Where there is any transmission involved, you are in effect telling the enemy what you are and where you might be.
“Such disadvantages need to be balanced against the advantages of doing it.”
PROPAGANDA VALUE
Mr James says a key concern would be whether the information could be intercepted by the enemy, or used against a soldier in captivity.
“We’ve already been using battlefield cameras in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says. “Again, that is often handy but it can also be quite problematic. It can give a limited — and therefore distorted — perspective of much larger events.”
In the hands of propagandists, such data could be further distorted to suit an agenda.
Mr James concedes such data could be a double-edged sword: “The counterargument is, if the soldier is transmitting his data back home, it doesn’t matter what the enemy says — we have the information and can release it to show what really went on.”
But there’s the potential such information could be used against the soldiers themselves, he adds.
“Most of the people we’ve fought since 1939 tend to not be very nice people … people that don’t obey international humanitarian law,” he says. “We haven’t had any Prisoners-of-War since Korea, but in Korea they were very badly mistreated and subjected to show trials.”
Mr James highlights a situation in the 1980s where soldiers were to be issued identity cards with magnetic strips containing personal, financial and health details. The card was vetoed on the basis it posed more of a risk to the soldier than a benefit, he says.
Under the 3rd Geneva Convention, soldiers are not required to divulge more than their name, rank service number and date of birth. Recordings of a soldier’ activities could reveal much more.
“This would aid an interrogator in breaking down a soldier’s ability to resist,” he says. “If they can use that information against the soldier, this will be a very serious problem … It’s just unfair to our diggers.
“At the end of the day, does it help the soldier or make things more dangerous?”