Proceedings Article | 4 May 2007
KEYWORDS: Thermography, Imaging systems, Infrared imaging, Infrared radiation, Target recognition, Reflection, Prototyping, Visible radiation, Sensors, Reflectivity
Historically, it is believed that fratricide accounts for up to 15% of friendly casualties during operations and a UK MoD
report identifies that almost half of all such casualties occur in situations involving ground units only. Such risks can be
mitigated, to an extent, via operational awareness and effective communications. However, recent conflicts have
involved a much more dynamic, complex and technically sophisticated battlefield than previously experienced. For
example, Operation Telic (Desert Storm) involved almost one million combatants and ten thousand armoured vehicles in
the coalition force, advancing across an extensive battlefront at high speed during daylight and at night, making effective
use of a range of electro-optic sensors. The accelerated tempo of battle means that front lines can undergo rapid,
punctuated advances that can leave individual combat units with a much degraded situational awareness, particularly of
where they are in relation to other 'friendly' combatants. Consequently, there is a need for a robust, low cost, low
weight, compact, unpowered, interoperable, Combat Identification technique for use with popular electro-optic sensors
which can be deployed, and is effective, at the individual combat unit level. In this paper we discuss ground-to-ground
combat identification materials that meet these requirements, all of which are based on the air-to-ground MirageTM
vehicle marking material. We show some preliminary ground-to-ground data collected from the new variant MirageTM
material in recent experimental trials conducted during the day, evening and at night.
