Neurotechnology and Operational Medicine - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 66

hypothesis for current operational safety and efficacy. A second principle is to know
ourselves and our allies. This principle is implemented by developing a facile work-
ing knowledge of our resources, capabilities, and vulnerabilities, by understanding
how they can be projected onto evolving scenarios, and by having an intuitive ability
to detect when unexpected or unusual behavioral conditions are emerging. A third
principle is to know what our foes expect to achieve. In the case of terrorism, one
primary goal is to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the operational medicine infra-
structure, which contributes to creating a sense of anxiety, panic, and hopelessness in
the population. A corollary of this principle is to know what our foes expect us to do.
The assumption that foes will try to exploit our actions to reach their goals implies
that our self-knowledge has high security value.
NEUROTECHNOLOGY AND FORMAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF SITUATION AWARENESS
Situation awareness is a concept that is invoked often without explicit definition in
operational contexts. This contribution explores applications of neurotechnology to
the issue of adaptively establishing and maintaining situation awareness in different
frames of reference, ranging from the relative macrocosm of operational command
and control to the relative microcosm of the perception of personal health. This issue
is viewed as analogous to an interaction of sensorimotor, interoceptive, and cog-
nitive neural networks in the expression of comorbid features (including emotion
and affect) of balance disorders, migraine, and anxiety disorders in conditions that
include mild traumatic brain injury (Balaban and Thayer 2001; Balaban et al. 2011;
Furman et al. 2013; Staab et al. 2013). This analogy can be rendered operational by
implementing hybrid agent-based and discrete simulation tools that can be param-
eterized for each frame of reference and used for real-time decision support (Balaban
et al. 2012; Wu et al. 2012).
The applications of this approach also will raise significant issues for security
and intelligence communities. For example, this approach can generate families of
trajectories for an individual patient's behavior in terms of latent (underlying) neural/
neurochemical mechanisms, which can be compared to the current status to guide
further treatment by improving the situational awareness of both the health provid-
ers and the patient. The same argument holds for a decision-maker in an applica-
tion of the approach to a command and control center. In either case, the individual
models become a metadata representation of the patient that can constitute a form
of protected personal information and, for key personnel, a matter of potential high
security and intelligence value.
NEUROTECHNOLOGY AND FORMAL OPERATIONAL
REPRESENTATIONS OF SITUATION AWARENESS
The March 1995 issue of the journal Human Factors was truly a watershed event in
the formalization of the concept of situation awareness as a cognitive construct. The
definitions of situation awareness included “adaptive, externally directed consciousness”