Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050: Workshop Report

Abstract

This report describes the proceedings and outcomes of an Army-sponsored workshop that brought together a diverse group of intellectual leaders to envision the future of the tactical ground battlefield. The group identified and discussed the following 7 interrelated future capabilities that they felt would differentiate the battlefield of the future from current capabilities and engagements: augmented humans; automated decision making and autonomous processes; misinformation as a weapon; micro-targeting; large-scale self-organization and collective decision making; cognitive modeling of the opponent; and the ability to understand and cope in a contested, imperfect information environment. The workshop concluded that a critical challenge of the mid-21st century will involve successfully managing and integrating the collections, teams, and swarms of robots that would act independently or collaboratively as they undertook a variety of missions including the management and protection of communications and information networks and the provision of decision quality information to humans. Success in this aspect of command and control (C2) would depend upon developing new C2 concepts and approaches.