I was fortunate to have the opportunity to Chair the SMI’s International Land Systems for a Digitised Battlespace at the Hatton Conference Centre, in London on November 9th 2006. I have published recently on my Chairing of an Air Weapons Systems Conference which I had believed would be quite separate in content from the Land Systems Conference until I started writing for Defence Integration and drew together my research, papers and experience in dealing with both theatres of combat.

For instance the SAE Technical Committee Developments on the Universal Armament Interface which is a solution currently being promoted by USAF at my Air Conference appears to have fallen on deaf ears at the European Defence Agency who predict that work will not even begin until 2015, which they announced at my Land Conference. Again, the USA steals the march on its NATO allies and looks to corner another market looming from the shadows: Defence Integration. The announcement of 2015 as the start date for the consideration of a Universal Armament Interface developed by the European Defence Agency was disappointing to hear.

Generally, there was an interesting angle to many of the presentations at the Digitised Battlespace Conference. A common theme was the continued development of Armour for use in Asymmetric Warfare, where armed soldiers come into direct contact with civilians often of the same nationality in instances of civil dispute. Great effort is being made to ensure not just the safety of military personnel but out of concern for the state of the protestor who can often be the aggressor. This was particularly evident in the presentations from the South

African Defence Force who seem to go to extraordinary lengths in preventing harm to civilian personnel. There were modifications ongoing to vehicles to prevent land transporters bottoming out in ditches built by ambushing civilians as well as further refinements to avoid head injuries to anyone in proximity to the vehicle.

My preferred part of any of the Conferences is always the Speaker’s Panel where there is an opportunity for direct feedback from peers which is so absent from the Scientific Literature. In journals it can take years to settle a dispute or even to get into print in the first place with publication dates set so far ahead. Instead the speakers were engaged in a lively debate which had the following unexpected outcomes.

1. As there is no military version of Microsoft available to defence forces globally, and also given you don’t want your PC crashing during a live fire encounter, there is a good deal of innovation in the field of personal computing in the battlefield. A combination of different solutions seems the preferred option – with regular off-the-shelf-laptops being used for general software applications and ruggedised bespoke hardware in use for any system interacting with armaments or critical systems, again you don’t want your microprocessor to hang with the enemy bearing down. There were manufacturers of ruggedised computer systems present at the Conference though they reported difficulties in the cooling of chips in a ruggedised case which is usually dust proof and insulated against vibrations and electromagnetic shock. The overall effect is that more primitive (and therefore more robust) chips are used which will not yield the same performance as more recently developed processors. Several other