Hyper-Enabled Operator: Situational Awareness as Armor

Abstract

The Hyper-Enabled Operator (HEO) project seeks to increase the survivability of special forces operators through increased situational awareness (SA) capabilities. The precursor to HEO was the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) which sought to protect operators during room clearing operations by increasing their armor coverage. This study used combat modeling to compare the benefits of HEO to TALOS. This project developed four base models, each based on a relevant mission set. Each base model was compared against two variant models. The first variant provided the operators with enhanced SA. The second variant increased operator armor coverage without a performance degradation from increased weight. For some scenarios the incorporation of SA increased survivability more than a large increase in armor. Further, the study found that enhancing SA increases survivability by 8.3% on average for the four mission sets; this increase is similar to increasing armor coverage by a factor of four.