The U.S. Army's Master Plan to Win the Wars of the Future

Kris Osborn

Security,

Super networked soliders 

The technology also uses a technique called a “chem light,” wherein a Soldier can highlight or “light up” a location to pass along key information such as the location of a cleared building or other data relevant to an ongoing fight.

“This helps the fight at the Platoon level by providing a visual picture or voice instruction about, for example, the location of a house they are going to take down,” Marsh added.

Nett Warrior also uses a chat or messaging function so that Soldiers can quickly communicate with one another in addition to looking at the screen on the device. Quickly translating from Arabic or Pashtun to English is also an emerging capability of Nett Warrior, a technology which could greatly help deployed Soldiers acquire and transmit key battlefield information.

The Army is upgrading and more widely deploying a cutting-edge battlefield force-tracking technology for dismounted Soldiers, enabling them to know the locations of their fellow Soldiers and more quickly find, identify, target and destroy enemy fighters.

Called Nett Warrior, the technology is a cell-phone-like device showing graphics on a small, digital moving map identifying fast-moving combat information.

“The power of this is to network the Soldier,” Lt. Col. Adrian Marsh, Product Manager, Ground Soldier System, told Scout Warrior in an interview last year.

The Army plans to more-widely deploy Nett Warrior, which has already been fielded with operational units, Marsh said. Furthermore, future iterations of the technology  will likely include the addition of field artillery information on the Nett Warrior system, he added.

This would help units identify longer range targets for artillery weapons in addition to tracking close quarter combat enemies.  

Nett Warrior has greatly helped forward-deployed mobile infantry units who often find themselves in fast-moving firefights with enemy fighters, Marsh said.

“It provides unprecedented situational awareness at the dismounted level through the map display. The icons show where all the other users are on the battlefield and the device allows for battlefield messaging. Everyone sees the same picture,” Marsh explained. “The battle changes in real time and information can transmit across the force in real time.”

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