Knowing the Enemy, Dealing with Deception, and Situation/Threat Estimation

The foundational principles of warfare have always required a combatant to “know the enemy and know yourself”, and to consider the likelihood that methods of deception will be employed on both sides. Further, the need to estimate adversarial situations, threats, and intentions imputes a need for forecasting these states to future times to be relevant to decision-making. These combined requirements lead to a very challenging context for the design, development, and evaluation of multisensor information fusion processes and systems. This paper reviews the nature of these requirements, points out that there is a wide range of related research across varied communities on these topics, and that there is relatively little work in the situation management and information fusion communities currently addressing these challenges. This paper is a call for new and more directly applicable research involving multidisciplinary efforts to advance Level 3 situation and threat estimation capabilities with human and sensor-based fusion systems that is essential for comprehensive situational awareness and assessment in adversarial environments.