Shoot & Scoot Assistant (SASA) - A Cognitive Decision Aid for Crew Served Weapons

"A military combat unit must "see" the battlefield better than the enemy, decide sooner than the enemy what to do, "move" to fight effectively and "shoot" to destroy the enemy. As the US Army moves toward weapons systems for the digital battlefield, newer,lighter weight and more capable hardware is emerging. These digital systems may not realize better "seeing", that is, situational awareness. Cognitive task load will be overwhelming if the crew is to interpret and distill the data, deciding what to dofast. Move and shot - while being shot at. Well-informed troops will outstrip an ill-formed enemy in a combat environment. It's all about whom gets into firing position first. We propose to assist crews of wheeled and tracked platforms by reducing thetime to assign fires for engagement of the enemy using a multi-role weapon-target pairing algorithm. Secondly, by "seeing the terrain and battlefield awareness", provide each controlled unit a maneuver command for increasing probability of kill whilereducing the unit's vulnerability to enemy fires. Together, these two functions form the "Shoot & Scoot Assistant". We will define an agent architecture that supports component reuse, embedded real-time decision support performance, and conforms to theJoint Technical Architecture-Army."