Micro Terrain Intelligence Revolution

Written by Christopher Tucker and CW3 Jason Feser

GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 6 (November/December)

As it pertains to the warfare between nation states, combat has advanced exponentially over the ages. The lessons in the application of the principles and art of war, however, have moved in a cyclical manner. Armies have learned and unlearned the lessons of the past, with the defeated army forcing change in the dynamics in how, why, and when combat is to be initiated. It is only in the rare occurrence in history where the technology forces radical change in doctrine.

Even so, there are two fundamental elements of warfare that remain virtually unchanged in the dynamic between warring states—terrain and weather. Despite the persistence of terrain as a factor in warfare, the significance and the manner in which we evaluate terrain continues to move in cycles.

The United States is currently engaged in operations where commanders are depending more and more on agile and adaptive leaders at the lowest levels. The history of the U.S. military offers many examples of ingenuity and resolve in which agile leaders have been enabled by the confidence of senior leaders willing to delegate the execution of national strategy down to the lowest level.

These feats of creativity and command latitude are codified in our doctrine as the commander’s intent. Development of the commander’s intent fundamentally depends on his tacit understanding of the spatial relationships of the critical elements of a mission, enemy, terrain, troops, time and civilians relevant to operations. As the military stepped into the urban environment in Iraq and Afghanistan and the complex terrain off the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, the battlefield geometry has grown exponentially complex. In this new environment, the commander’s grasp of the battlespace has come to rely on precision terrain data as never before. This has been the driving force behind the micro terrain intelligence revolution.

Micro terrain intelligence is defined as the activity of logical deduction or inference of the geospatial relationship between features, events or phenomena through the examination of highresolution terrain data, imagery and operational realities in order to support tactical operations.

COMMAND AND TERRAIN

World War II marked a significant change in the manner in which the American soldier approached the battlefield. The maturity of the machine gun, artillery, tank, and airplane required warfighters to think in more than two dimensions. A simple question—“Where am I and where is the enemy?”—had evolved from a simple Cartesian coordinate on the battlefield to a much broader appreciation of the four-dimensional battlespace.

The German army of WWII demonstrated the ability to maneuver and coordinate in a combined arms operation. The technological advances of that conflict had brought to bear a new form of warfare in which the battle was no longer waged from trench to trench or visible horizon to horizon. Radios, artillery and aircraft brought forward the ability for armies to displace an entrenched force so that commanders could engage them in a manner of their choosing.

In fact, the paradigm of front-to-back operations began to erode in WWII, and the effects have never been more evident than the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. WWII leaders discovered that the time, place and strength of an opposing force could be influenced through technological resources, but many commented that terrain and weather were the sole factors that were beyond their control. Operations can always be adapted to terrain, but terrain can not always be adapted to operations.

The terrain of Normandy is characterized by small fields, thick hedgerows and sunken roadways; micro-obstacles on an individual basis represented a regional obstacle on a strategic scale. The dash to Berlin was planned in legs measured in hundreds of miles, while the tactical or practical reality was limited to the next bocage. It is in this way that the battlespace was divided between the two forces: an operational landscape as seen through the lexicon of the Overlord Operation, and the practical landscape in which the Germans employed target reference points and ambushes that maximized the effects of technology laid over terrain.

Every commander is taught the importance of mastering the terrain over which they will conduct operations. Even before George Washington led the Continental Army in battle against the British, battle commanders have relied on assessments of terrain by scouts and engineers to help them master their terrain. It was Carl von Clausewitz, in On War, who declared: “Geography and the character of the ground bear a close and ever-present relation to warfare. They have a decisive influence on the engagement, both as to its course and to its planning and execution.”

It is worth noting that Clausewitz chose to work backwards from the singular engagement in warfare to the planning and execution of warfare. When applied to the WWII example of operations in Normandy, we can see that realities of the practical landscape ultimately influence a commander’s concept of the operational landscape. Echoes of this can be identified as we move forward to more contemporary operations.

In recent years, we have all witnessed a long-term shift away from major combat operations over open and rolling terrain toward counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, force protection, reconstruction, and other population- and human-centric operations within complex and urban terrain. In this new multi-faceted concept of operations, the notion of “engaging the enemy at a time and place of your choosing” takes on completely new meaning.

Issues of acceptable topographic scale have been altered with the introduction of computers on the battlefield. What once seemed to be sufficient topographic detail, and the manner in which that detail is conveyed, has fundamentally shifted. In this, one can easily see micro terrain intelligence as a realization of modern operational realities.

ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE

In 1959, the Army published a field manual (FM 30-10) on military terrain intelligence. The use of the term “intelligence” was not meant to imply that intelligence was the only function that was served by such analytical work. Rather, the term described a sophisticated body of tradecraft and knowledge that allows its practitioners to derive actionable intelligence from the terrain and weather in support of engineering, operations and plans, or indeed, broader intelligence activities.

Later, the term “intelligence” was dropped from the title of the field manual, though the geospatial engineering community (also known as the topographic engineering or terrain analysis community) has long been, and continues to be, the operational partner of military intelligence. Although the term has faded from the operational lexicon, the discipline of terrain intelligence has long served and will continue to serve as an essential component of intelligence-driven operations.

The term terrain intelligence evolved as the introduction of tactical nuclear weapons led the Army general staff to restructure the service around small, mobile combat units, which were expected to act quickly and on their own initiative, equipped with helicopters and low ground-pressure vehicles. This was the “pentomic” Army. Commanders and planners required a great deal of detail in topographic maps, as this new force structure shifted from an operational scope represented in a 1:500,000 scale map to the 1:100,000 scale map.

This enabled commanders and their staff to focus on what the terrain allowed for in terms of maneuver and necessitated the new term, terrain intelligence. Although this force structure was ultimately abandoned during Vietnam War, the focus on terrain intelligence was never lost. Moreover, the rise of computers on the battlefield has meant that terrain no longer simply fuels topographic maps, but supports complex terrain-based decision support.

The central concepts of the Army terrain intelligence manual reflect both the requirements of major combat operations over slow and rolling terrain, and those of lighter forces engaged in more limited operations over appreciably more complex terrain. Fortunately, many of the techniques for determining mobility, visibility, structural assessment and other forms of terrain analysis are no different when applied at the micro scale. These concepts can engender an even wider array of applications in a compressed environment given an appropriate level of precision terrain data.

The significance of these concepts tends to lose value in the American setting. Consider the urban construct of an American city, no older than 270 years. The American urban environment embraces relatively broad, straight streets sighted on a fairly uniform grid suitable to governance and ordnances established by the electorate.

That contrasts with “Old Town” in Mosul, Iraq, for example, where most Americans are incapable of conceptualizing the intricate and narrow passages. Much like the hedgerows of Normandy, the winding passages limit dismounted mobility and can frustrate offensive operations. Consider the geometries involved with line of sight for an M4 carbine in an American urban environment compared to a dense city that dates back to 850 B.C. It is in this compressed and foreign environment that micro terrain intelligence imparts a significant tactical advantage.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

The concepts embodied in FM 30-10 have given way to new techniques that are powerful when applied to extremely high resolution data. Beginning in the late 1990s, the research and development into the collection, processing and exploitation of high-resolution terrain data opened up entirely new possibilities for terrain intelligence, and new ways in which the geospatial engineering community could better serve commanders in the field.

The Rapid Terrain Visualization (1997) and Urban Recon (2003) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations (ACTD) successfully demonstrated a variety of collection, processing and exploitation technologies that generated complementary, high-resolution data sources. These data sources combined to generate the first micro terrain intelligence products, which were broadly heralded as the future of mission planning over complex and urban terrain.

During these ACTDs, a variety of technologies addressing different phenomenologies were the subject of experimentation. Highresolution terrain data was derived from stereo-imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), demonstrating the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and operational challenges of each. During this period, we also saw the proliferation of commercial terrestrial, airborne and space-based capabilities across these categories. The unique processing and exploitation capabilities associated with each technology/phenomenology were the source of experimentation and innovation in order to facilitate dissemination and visualization capabilities. The sheer volume of micro terrain data, as it was being collected at such a high resolution, itself posed unique challenges.

LiDAR sensors in particular saw spectacular maturation over this period, including the release of a wide array of COTS LiDAR processing and visualization products, based on years of government sponsored innovation. Both terrestrial and airborne LiDAR came into common industrial use, and their combination with high-resolution imaging technologies demonstrated the ability to generate high-resolution, geospatially accurate, synthetic reproductions of the observed environment.

Since 2004, the Army’s Buckeye program has been an operational instantiation of this stream of micro terrain intelligence innovation. While the ACTD-tested technologies offered high-resolution collection opportunities, it was unclear what that correct operational configuration and CONOPS should look like. It took deployment and test of these technologies in theater with 1/25 “Lancer” Stryker Brigade Combat Team to make these determinations.

These deployments were focused on determining the requisite resolution that micro terrain intelligence must take in order to usefully serve the geospatial engineering community, their partners in the military intelligence community, and the platoon operating in Mosul. These requirements were traded against the operational flight ceiling, flight speed and risks that various combinations of these two factors might entail. Ultimately, the program demonstrated the value of 10 cm resolution color imagery to the world’s most discerning customer—the platoon leader.

In the end, the Buckeye program was capable of collecting highly accurate 10 cm color imagery with 1 m posting terrain data (DTED 5), using a complete commercial package to include airframe, airborne digital camera and LiDAR. Buckeye operated below the 10,000 foot operational ceiling specifically to suit the geospatial engineering community, military intelligence collection managers, and commanders in the field. The 10 cm resolution represented the operational consensus on utility in full-spectrum operations in complex urban terrain. This resolution has proved tremendously useful to U.S. and coalition forces.

CHAOS OR CREATIVITY

When we talk about micro terrain intelligence, we aren’t just talking about a specific sensor, but rather about enabling a celebrated ability of the American military to adapt and achieve mission success. Operational art and tactical ingenuity require resources that are flexible and can be molded to solve problems. The only question that should be addressed from the strategic level is this: What are the basic tools and resources we need to provide to these agile minds?

As an unnamed German officer is reported to have said, “The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis.”

One army’s chaos may be another army’s pursuit of agility in its leaders and premium on creativity. The commander’s intent is issued in every operation order for a specific reason. In the absence of orders and the inability to ask for clarification, every leader will have the ability to function in order to achieve the strategic goal in operations. Although some may perceive this as chaotic, the commander’s intent serves our leaders as a tool by which to achieve mission success in even the most daunting conditions and environment.

High-resolution images and micro terrain intelligence of the operational environment are a natural pair to the commander’s intent, enabling junior leaders to operate in an operational framework with a detailed spatial context that quantifies the four dimensions of the battlespace.

Clearly a major force in generating demand for micro terrain intelligence is the shift toward population- and human-centric operations—a trend that appears likely to continue. The commercial ubiquity of high-resolution terrain data within applications such as Google Earth is also a clear factor generating demand for micro terrain intelligence. Under these conditions, we anticipate that at each change of command, we will see more and more policymakers, commanders, analysts and operators demanding high-resolution intelligence over complex and urban terrain.

On a tactical scale of relevance, the value of information on the battlefield is equal to its timeliness divided by its geospatial precision. “Where am I, where or what is the enemy, and what effects can I bring to bear?”

The micro terrain intelligence revolution is clearly under way. This is a revolution with the potential to prevent the loss of innocent lives, aid the reconstruction of devastated areas, protect U.S. and coalition warfighters, and vastly increase the lethality of operations against our enemies. ♦

Christopher Tucker is a board member of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. CW3 Jason Feser is with the EUCOM Joint Analysis Center at RAF Molesworth.

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