The U. S. Army Future Concept for the Human Dimension

8-3. Integration of S&T

Technological efforts to improve human performance come from all areas of S&T development and are often combinations of two or more disciplines. A sample of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s projects include efforts to provide an individual more energy, require less sleep, allow smarter and faster analysis of information, build stronger exoskeletons, augment cognition, improve digestion, and produce tougher bodies.¹⁷⁹ Taken together, these projects aim to enable Soldiers to perform at peak efficiency. In the near future, such internal enhancements will rely on mechanical augmentation, drugs, and psychological behavior modifications. In the longer term, gene manipulation may strive to improve human performance while nanotech implants dispense advanced drugs to increase efficiency of the physical processes. A challenge for any program or project seeking to enhance human performance will be to carefully investigate and define the trade-offs. The human experience provides few if any examples of technologies that confer benefits without an attendant risk.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) Human Research and Engineering Directorate is an Army organization for research and development in the human dimension. The Human Research and Engineering Directorate also conducts a broad-based program of scientific research and technology on optimizing Soldier performance and Soldier-machine interactions to maximize battlefield effectiveness. One ARL program is developing human factors technologies and design principles that protect and extend the Soldier's physical, perceptual, cognitive, and psychological performance under hostile and highly stressed conditions. This will enable the individual Soldier, the weapon system’s crew, and the battle staff to comprehend and manage the vast quantities of data expected to flow across the digitized battlefield in both automated and degraded support modes. This will in turn effectively integrate the weapon’s operator, maintainer, and trainer in evolving crew station, equipment, and unit designs.
The U.S. Army's Manpower and Personnel Integration Program is the Army's comprehensive program for improving the effectiveness of system performance. The program insures that the Army will factor Soldier abilities, aptitudes, and physical characteristics into the design of the equipment. Furthermore, the Manpower and Personnel Integration Program seeks to insure that systems, once fielded, will be able to perform their assigned training and operational missions, and be reliable, maintainable, and supportable under combat conditions.
The Military Operational Medicine Research Program provides biomedical solutions that protect Soldiers and enhance performance in operational and training environments that include multiple stressors (see fig 8-1). Military Operational Medicine Research Program makes an effort to identify those factors internal and external to the individual Soldier, that act to degrade individual performance.





Figure 8-1. Military Operational Medicine Research Program
The program’s solution strategies include bioenergetics to deal with environmental extremes, injury biodynamics-focused behaviors and equipment to reduce risk of injury, neuropsychology to address fatigue and psychiatric injuries, psychophysics to examine visual and auditory performance, and force health protection limits environmental health risks.¹⁸⁰ Also among their considerations is the ability of the human mind and body to deal with the scope and complexity of technology. Currently, the S&T available limits human endeavor. In the future, the reverse may be the norm, in that, the ability of the human to accept and use leading edge technologies becomes limiting. The integration of S&T with the individual enhances that ability and pushes the limits upward and outward. As the S&T trends take shape, the tools available to ARL, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other research and development entities will greatly expand the potential solutions. By 2030, the ethical and moral questions of human enhancement and behavior control may be more of a limitation on the process than the scientific and technological capabilities.
The other aspect of integration of S&T into the human dimension concerns those technologies that provide new or augment existing external capabilities. As is the case with the internal enhancements discussed above, these advanced technology capabilities are in and of themselves neutral.
Advanced computer technologies will provide significant assistance to future human decisionmaking. These include providing improved training to the human decisionmakers, improved forms of communication and coordination, external memory or perceptual aids, enhanced access to relevant data and information, and active decision support systems where the computer is an active participant in the problem solving and decisionmaking process.
While the speed and capacity of advanced computing decision support systems will increase geometrically, a human interface will remain necessary. Complete automation is implausible as a solution when the underlying tasks and task environments are sufficiently complex (for example, total reliance on the programming to anticipate and deal adequately with all possible scenarios through their design). Furthermore, even for designs touted as completely automated, this is rarely the case. People still interact with the software either to overcome or recover from its limitations in unanticipated situations, or to perform maintenance and upgrades. Models of human behavior and human knowledge embedded inside computer decision support systems will continue to provide valuable assistance to humans but still not be able to match the completeness and complexity of the human brain.¹⁸¹
Historically, many S&T advancements have proven ultimately to improve the human condition. Chemical warfare in World War I led to the pest control agents and fertilizers that help grow crops to feed the world. The atom bomb of World War II engendered a whole array of nuclear energy and nuclear medicine technologies. S&T trends derive from many sources in addition to weapons programs. Interaction with the OE strongly influences how S&T interacts with the human dimension.
Trends in the OE indicate a future with increasing competition for scarce resources, clashing ideologies, and a growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Such an environment may foster a tendency to weaponize advanced technologies and default to the military application of dual use technologies at the expense of benefits to the human race. Rapid advances and convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the materials sciences can be of great benefit to the human dimension, but can also add to the capabilities of adversaries to engage in biological warfare or bioterrorism.
The interrelationship between the internal and external S&T advancements as they affect the human dimension and the human dimension effects on that integration bears examination. First, internal and external technologies limit each other. Advanced technologies will outpace the ability of humans to employ their full potential efficiently and effectively. More data arriving more quickly is not advancement if the human receptor cannot process that data into understanding and knowledge. This drives research and development into internal enhancements that will improve the human ability to process the data and act on the knowledge he derives.
As the capability of the individual approaches the potential of the external technologies, these technologies will in turn stretch the envelope. This interaction results in an iterative process whereby all facets of S&T continually advance while their application within the human dimension must keep pace.