Warfighter Performance Focus Area
Strategic Drivers: Increasing personnel costs, effective crew manning requirements, distributed access to enormous data sets and a dynamic asymmetric threat all drive an increased focus on warfighter performance, effectiveness and efficiency.
Vision: More effective point of injury care for Sailors and Marines. Enhanced health and warfighter performance both afloat and ashore. Highly efficient and effective human-system performance aided by new technologies created through the exploitation of biological design principles. Enhanced warfighter and system performance with reduced personnel costs as a result of the right information being provided to the right people with the right skills at the right time in the right jobs.
Description: This focus area will ensure warfighter readiness through enhancing medical technologies in the field, developing effective simulation-based training and creating computational cognitive models that accurately represent human training requirements and total ownership costs. The skill, intelligence, adaptability and health of our Sailors and Marines are critical to mission success. Warfighters must be recruited, assigned and trained effectively and efficiently to ensure optimal performance while reducing personnel costs. Combat systems must exploit the differing strengths of human and machine elements to provide needed capacity across all warfighting conditions. Decision support systems must supply the right information to the right people at the right time. Training and analytical tools must be extended to address the irregular warfare challenges posed by nontraditional social, political, economic, ethnic and religious factors that can affect operations. Improvements to helmet, body armor and eye and ear protection must be designed to ensure comfort and ease of employment. Responding quickly and effectively to combat injury is imperative. Health and fitness must be preserved to ensure warfighter resilience against physical and psychological threats in both peace and war. Biological-inspired design principles should be exploited to create new technologies to enhance warfighter effectiveness.
Objectives
Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education
- Training technologies to enhance fundamental information-processing abilities in young adults
- Techniques to shorten training time, reduce training costs and maximize training impact
- Tools and techniques to achieve ubiquitous, engaging, scenario-based training
- Personnel recruitment, selection, assignment, retention and professional development models and tools that enhance workforce diversity and mission capability
Human System Design and Decision Support
- Reduce training and workload requirements through better system design
- Create design engineering tools and design standards incorporating human capacities into system performance
- Incorporate the human element into design and control of autonomous and robotic systems
- Effective, user-friendly decision support systems for kinetic and non-kinetic operations
Bio-Engineered Systems
- Engineer biologically-inspired intelligent sensors and autonomous systems
- Computational cognitive models for intelligent systems
- Synthetic biology for materials development and energy production
- Create and exploit advances in brain-based processors to enhance combat systems design
Warfighter Health and Survivability
- Enhanced first responder capability at point of injury and en-route care to reduce combat casualties Reduce incidence of noise-induced hearing loss and potentially restore hearing
- Advanced materials and improved design for lightweight body armor and equipment
- Mitigate health and performance risks in undersea operations
Review other sections online or download the complete strategic plan.