CBRN Situational Awareness and Guidance for Military Armoured Vehicles

The CBRN early warning capability gives armoured forces the information required to minimize personnel losses due CBRN agents, enable timely personnel protection, and maintain momentum. These are typically by being able to divert away from contaminated area and avoid the contamination, enabling vehicle protective systems when needed, using personal protection systems, and decontamination to avoid accidental spreading of CBRN agents.

Armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, main battle tanks, heavy armoured combat vehicles and light multirole vehicles have an essential need for real-time early warning of CBRN threat for smart and effective use of protective measures. They benefit from early warning CBRN detectors that discover the emergence, presence, and absence of the threat agents in the operating environment. CBRN sensor systems can be considered as elements for augmenting the overall battlefield situational awareness and enabling the effective and smart triggering of protective systems like CBRN filtration on the individual vehicles.

The armoured CBRN reconnaissance vehicles with their full CBRN detection and identification capabilities create more comprehensive and accurate situational awareness data and it can be used to deploy physical markers to define the contaminated area perimeter on ground so that units entering the area know which areas to avoid. The military armoured vehicles can be perceived as members of a larger network with each vehicle unit having an impact on the overall perception of the CBRN scene achieved through the collection of data by individuals, sensor systems, and intelligence. The fusion of all these information sources enables the ability to understand the implications, characteristics, and the precise nature of the CBRN threats present and their impact on the operational environment, missions, and ground forces.

In the middle of the rapidly evolving CBRN threat landscape the performance of the military armoured vehicles is put to a real test.  The vehicles must provide protection to its’ crew by implementing a CBRN early warning system that triggers defensive measures and warning and reporting CBRN incidents to the command centre. All armoured vehicles should have capability detect and locate the CBRN threats and the specialized CBRN reconnaissance vehicles must have the additional capability to identify, track and predict the behaviour of CBRN threats.

The vehicle commander can make a better decision on how to limit or avoid the exposure to CBRN threat without sacrificing movement when real-time CBRN data is presented at the vehicle battle management display.

This document was originally written by former Application Manager, CBRN Systems, Vehicle/CIP Solutions Katja Kiukas and later on revised by CBRN Application Manager Petri Karhula.