Impact of blue force tracking on combat identification judgments

We examined the effectiveness of blue force tracking (BFT) decision support for dismounted infantry soldiers.

Technologies to support combat identification (CID) are rapidly evolving and may be deployable to dismounted soldiers in the future. BFT systems are designed to mitigate the risk of fratricide by supplying positional information regarding friendly units to enhance situation awareness.

Participants played the role of a dismounted infantry soldier in a first-person perspective gaming environment and made engagement decisions for a series of simulated targets, half of which were enemies and half of which were friends.

Participants performed better overall when they were able to use a BFT system than when they performed the task without assistance. When a 10-s latency was added to the updating of position information in the BFT, participants made significantly more false alarms (engaged a friendly target) regardless of whether they knew about the latency.

The results indicate the promise of a personal BFT device to reduce the likelihood of fratricide by dismounted infantry soldiers. The results, however, also indicate that the effectiveness of such a device can be dramatically reduced when it does not provide real-time data.

Potential applications of this research include development of performance standards for BFT devices and assessment of decision support for dismounted soldiers.