The modern battlespace is evolving and requiring more situational awareness each day, as evident in the ever-changing strategies unfolding in Eastern Ukraine and across the Middle East. Additionally, the complexities of global conflicts and the advances of modern technology are making the world smaller. The United States and its allies must arm their coalition forces with the very latest capabilities to anticipate and deny adversaries’ intended tactics and to defeat hostile aggressions.
As the industry’s Trusted Disruptor, L3Harris Technologies leverages decades of experience supporting highly technical defense organizations’ requirements across all domains with agile and responsive capabilities that meet the needs of our customers now and well into the future.
When it comes to the needs of the tactical-edge warfighter in a next-generation command-and-control network, we understand that expeditious mission success, soldier safety and national security will require advanced vision systems to not only relay networked battlespace intelligence to the user’s eye but also leverage the user as a sensor for the overarching joint-force network.
L3Harris’ advanced vision solutions are more than just the most-sophisticated night-vision systems on the planet – they are advanced situational awareness systems. These devices are capable of delivering two-way connections between soldiers and other nodes in the battlespace, including unmanned systems and command-and-control (C2) assets, facilitating artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision making.
When the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle – Binocular (ENVG-B) and similar advanced vision solutions are recognized more as nodes within a much larger ecosystem, their software-defined architecture approaches can provide point-to-point protection to other nodes. This means, in any time of day, in any environment, our fighting forces can see the enemy before they can see our troops.
Soldier wearing helmet-mounted ENVG-B night vision
Imagine the implications and opportunities available when a soldier equipped with an ENVG-B can not only receive full-motion video from an unmanned aircraft providing overwatch but also transmit live images or video, overlaid with other battlespace information filtered through AI and mixed- and augmented-reality capabilities, back to the C2 team steering the UAS, identifying potential ground threats – all in near-real-time. From there, mission planners can send and update objectives and tactics in almost real time to advanced night-vision system-equipped operators.
Close-up of soldier wearing ENVG-B night vision
When soldiers act as nodes in a unified ecosystem, that’s bilateral network protection. And this is where we are investing, innovating and partnering with industry leaders to expand the enhanced night vision capability in our goggles as a force multiplier. As we continue to improve and advance the highest-performance night-vision systems, we are learning more about the future technology that can be inserted to push data into cloud environments for applications ranging from Fires to Logistics to Intelligence – and even aided target acquisition.
As we harness the full capability of our night vision situational awareness capabilities, we recognize that open-design concepts and software-only upgradability will be key elements to successful troop modernization. The U.S. Army currently has tens of thousands of goggles in their inventory, all of which will need to keep current with emerging digital requirements.
The ability to continue to enhance fielded systems that are net-enabled and AI-ready also enables defense organizations to harness cost efficiencies by integrating these devices into new digitally focused mission command ecosystems.
