Fratricide is a fact of war; yet, its pervasiveness is shocking. It is likely to grow as future conflicts are fought in complex urban battlespaces with ever more diverse military coalitions. Under such conditions, correctly identifying "friend from foe" is challenging, and accurate combat identification becomes even more difficult when the "friends" speak different languages, employ diverse tactics and procedures, use dissimilar equipment, and employ differing communication techniques.

Solving this challenge is an urgent need, well recognized by coalition forces. In fact, the Strategic Plan for the Next Generation of Training for the Department of Defense lists developing "capabilities for individual and collective training that support evolving fratricide prevention measures and combat identification tactics, techniques and procedures" among its Training Top Ten (Department of Defense, 2010b). Combat identification is currently accomplished through the application of situational awareness and target identification with significant emphasis on utilizing technology-based systems to sort friends from enemies, neutrals and non-combatants. These technology-based systems can only confirm the presence of a friendly force unit or identify a unit as unknown - and that unknown unit could still fall anywhere on the spectrum of friend, enemy, neutral or non-combatant. Novel combat identification tactics, training, and technological innovations must be developed because of this. In this paper, we present a review of the theory and history of combat identification, an assessment of the challenges faced by coalition forces, the gaps, and areas for future developments in training and research. We close with a discussion of a training initiative being assessed at Bold Quest, an annual Joint/coalition exercise at which new combat identification approaches are demonstrated.

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Jay Reist