Challenge 2: New sensors to save lives in urban combat
African rainforest are not the only place where extra eyes and ears can save lives. Belgian soldiers often work with and train our allies in hot spots all over the world, and that includes urban settings.
Urban combat presents a set of unique problems. It’s not linear like the trench warfare of old. The biggest challenge is not understanding what’s in front of you – it’s understanding what you can’t see to your sides and rear:
- All movement creates exposed flanks and openings
- Opponents can move around to get behind you, or underneath you through sewage and tunnel systems, as well as above you through ceilings and bridges between buildings
- It’s extremely difficult to keep track of your allies, not only of the opponents
And if the task of making sense of this dynamic environment was not hard enough, there are a few more complications:
- There’s usually no 4G backbone – it gets eliminated quickly, and standard communications frequencies are often jammed
- Recovering sensors is usually impossible, so they can’t be expensive
- Soldiers carry a lot of equipment already; adding more weight and bulk is a challenge
- It’s impossible to go back and check why a sensor has gone offline – is it because the battery is flat or because someone destroyed it?
BELDEF currently has no standard sensors to use in the urban combat setting. The ones that are available (predominantly visual) are large and very expensive. There are, of course, military-grade drones – but those are also prohibitively expensive, and not always right for the job.
Your challenge: work with your BELDEF team members to understand what information would be critical in the urban combat setting, and come up with ingenious solutions that are:
- Light, small easy to hide
- Simple and inexpensive, potentially manufactured locally
- Integrating different sensors, both standard and unexpected, such as (for example) a cheap infrared sensor in combination with blue force tracking through whatever other means, a detector of adversary’s drones
- Able to connect to and share data with the standard communications systems (ATAK)
