The key to force lethality, survivability, and unit efficiency is the effective use of human resources. People are the most critical component of weapon systems. They are also the most costly component. Personnel and related costs exceed $70 billion annually. There is an additional $20–30 billion spent on training, not all of which currently hits the mark. Part of the HSI mission is to lower this training burden while extending training effectiveness. This expenditure represents about 40 percent of the $241 billion FY97 defense budget. The Human Systems Interface S&T program directly contributes to all Joint Staff future warfighting capabilities by optimizing the use of the DoD’s most critical resource—its people. The impacts of these technologies include:

Combat systems will be designed to capitalize on human strengths and mitigate weaknesses while simultaneously improving sustainment and support of warfighting systems. Advances in warrior protection systems address concerns about casualties in conflict. By providing the personal protection and life support necessary to meet current and future threats, these technology efforts make the individual warrior more effective and achieve force multiplication. With fewer soldiers executing the mission, we decrease the tax burden and put fewer warfighters in harm’s way while still achieving mission objectives. Advances in human systems interface technologies are essential for the services to meet their global commitments in combat and peacekeeping roles.

Human Systems Interface technology takes a unique, multidisciplinary approach to the human role in combat operations. Our collective capability to draw on the physical, biological, biomedical, and behavioral sciences to support the core of human factors engineering S&T is more critical than ever. Instead of facing a single massive threat, the warfighter is also challenged by the potential of simultaneous, multiple, low–intensity conflicts. A force with new and larger weapon systems with increasing speed, range, and firepower is now joined by a smaller force with fewer weapon systems but with more functionality, fewer hands–on training hours, fewer people, less acquisition, and aging systems that must be maintained. This change in focus places a growing demand on the human, who is in the loop of every weapon system.

To achieve this, a more affordable, yet more broadly deployed, more "ready" force, the services must increasingly emphasize "force–multiplying" weapon systems and training and retention of qualified people and their personal protection, sustainment, and survival during operations. For the full range of weapon systems, Human Systems Interface technology is integral to major gains in operability, effectiveness, availability, and affordability. Over a weapon system’s life cycle, the cost of the people to operate and maintain the system typically is significantly higher than the cost of the system’s hardware. Through vigorous application of Human Systems Interface technologies to current and future weapon systems, we can achieve gains such as 50 percent reductions in average crew size, 25 percent reductions in physical, perceptual, and cognitive workloads, 15 percent or more reduction in the weight of personal equipment, 30 percent overall weight reduction in ballistic protection while decreasing casualties, doubling critical decision making accuracy and reliability, quadrupling overall crew member situation awareness, and achieving a 50 percent reduction in total life–cycle costs.

ID&PE aims to enhance soldier capabilities for both cognitive–perceptual and physical–physiological task demands. For the near term, in both cases the first tactic is to lower requirements through "human friendly" design of interfaces, tasks, and equipment. Extensive remapping of our understanding of these interactions is necessitated by the extremely rapid response needed to take advantage of force–multiplier technologies. Further, a good deal of work is needed to extrapolate beyond guidelines from the private sector and academia, where demands are not at militarily significant levels.

For the mid to far term, full–time, real–time situation awareness is the core challenge for cognitive S&T research. Information technology developments are critical to making available to the soldier the information potential lurking on the digitized battlefield of tomorrow. The primary route is through human engineering and integration of emerging sensor, display, and processor technologies to organize, identify, manage, and present critical combat data. Next, we must enhance mental performance via complementing human processing strengths and weaknesses, including lowering cognitive and perceptual demands under conditions of extreme physical demands and other stressors. Night vision devices, 3D auditory displays, and ergonomic design of tasks and tools will lead the way to enhanced performance for the 21st century soldier (see roadmap for timelines).

Challenges include presenting information (visual, aural, haptic) to the warfighter using robust displays that remain friendly even under combat stress conditions. Stressors range from those of jungle combat to those of rotorcraft warfare. New ways are needed to represent and visualize information extracted from the buzz and fog of war. How to use multimodal control and input methods such as touch, speech, eye tracking, and natural language requires a serious S&T mentality.

A second challenge is to extend the soldier’s physical, cognitive, and psychological capabilities. This involves a core human factors task—that of merging and extending existing models of biodynamics and ergonomics with emerging models of human cognition, decision making, and human stress. Once this is done, no time can be wasted in a transition to integration with weapon systems models, C³I models, and realistic soldier–in–the–loop mission scenarios.

The overarching objective here is to improve weapon system effectiveness, availability, and affordability throughout development, fielding, and life cycle. DI&S goals include:

Earlier in this chapter, complexities brought about by emerging technologies was discussed. While the massive amount of human performance data collected over the past few decades could help reduce the effects of these complexities, the data are not always retrievable or transformable into in a form useful to efforts toward future human–system integration. A penalty is that the soldier’s need often is addressed too late in the design and even fielding phases. Largely due to human variability, even linking the best of these data to CAD/computer–aided engineering (CAE) tools is considerably more difficult than when using data for physical systems.

New methods are needed to help share data among diverse disciplines and platforms, to extrapolate currently known human performance data into the 10–15 year future system, and to use the proper metrics for measuring progress.

The roadmap of technology objectives for the Human Systems Interface is shown in Table IV–28.

The influence of this technology area on TRADOC FOCs is summarized in Table IV–29.