Quantification Of Combat Team Survivability With High Power Rf Directed Energy Weapons

Modern combat teams face an increasingly complex battlefield, where threats may arise from a number of different sources. Examples include not only conventional attacks through rocket propelled grenades but also improvised explosive devices and weaponised unmanned aerial vehicles. Combat teams can now be equipped with sophisticated surveillance and reconnaissance capability, as well as automatically activated defences. The focus of this paper is to consider the utility of collaborative active protection systems, which are designed to provide an active defence against threats to a combat team. Specifically, a general statistical framework for the analysis of such systems is introduced, with a particular focus on high power radio frequency directed energy weapon countermeasures. The mathematical model allows for a subset of the combat team to be responsible for target detection and tracking, and a time-varying subset of team members with suitable countermeasures to be specified separately. The overall probability of threat defeat and team survivability is then derived. Some examples are provided to investigate the utility of such systems.