Domain Of Warfare Research Articles

Killing at a Distance: Aerial Targeting and the Right to Life

Over a century ago, military aviation opened up a new domain of warfare. Since then, air power has become integral to modern warfare. In the words of the UK’s Air and Space Doctrine, air power harbours a distinct strategic potential in its own right and acts as a ‘force multiplier by enabling and enhancing other military and non-military effects’. However, legal constraints imposed by human rights law now threaten to undermine air power’s strategic potential. The jurisprudence of international and domestic courts has extended the applicability of international human rights norms to military operations conducted overseas and expanded the substantive obligations borne by States in such circumstances. The case-law relating to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) has been at the forefront of these trends. As I argue in this paper, the cumulative effect of this development poses a strategic risk to the use of air power by the State parties to the ECHR. Except for a handful of judgments, the bulk of the relevant jurisprudence has evolved with reference to military operations on land. As a result, principles that are difficult to implement in a land environment now extend into a domain for which they are even less suited. The jurisprudence therefore stands at a juncture. By remaining blind to the distinct features of aerial operations, it may impose obligations on States that will undermine the utility of air power, respect for fundamental rights and freedoms or, at worst, both. Alternatively, by becoming more attuned to the special features of operations in the air, it may be able to reconcile the sometimes diverging demands of aerial warfare and human rights norms. The aim of this draft paper is to assess the risk that these developments pose to air power by focusing on the extra-territorial applicability of the ECHR and the application of the right to life in the context of air operations. Section II challenges the conventional wisdom that jurisdiction within the meaning of Article 1 of the ECHR must be equated with actual control. Instead, I suggest that the extra-territorial reach of the Convention, as it emerges from the progressive evolution of the case-law, cannot be understood without distinguishing between jurisdiction as regulatory authority and jurisdiction as actual control.

Five Myths about Military Ethics

ABSTRACT: After a decade and a half of struggling across various dimensions, the Army's ethic risks losing traction with its practitioners. With that loss of traction comes a commensurate loss of trust, which will have a negative impact on the relationship the military has with the society it serves, undermining its status as a profession. Addressing these challenges requires getting past the myths that obscure the solutions. ********** As Dr. Snider notes, winning in a complex world requires a professional military capable of generating new expert knowledge that addresses the demands of evolving characters of war as well as the changing society the military serves. Ethical application of this knowledge is critical since it demonstrates our moral commitment and provides the cornerstone of our trust with the American people. This trust will be essential if the military profession is to navigate the uncertain and ambiguous environment associated with twenty-first-century security challenges. To this end, the following article addresses current challenges to the military profession and its ethic. While professional and ethical challenges have multiple sources, such as endless wars, eroding resilience, bad leader behaviors at multiple levels, and the impact of technology, they cannot be resolved without dispelling the myths that often obscure the solutions. The first challenge is acceptance. After a decade and a half of fighting among the peoples and struggling with restrictive rules of engagement, the military ethic risks losing traction with practitioners, who often see restrictions on the use of force as misguided, or worse, cynical efforts of higher authorities to avoid bad publicity, often at the soldier's expense. The second related myth is the psychological impact this ethical confusion imposes on soldiers. Ambiguous moral commitments and weak understanding impact their experiences of the harms they commit and the sacrifices they and their comrades make. The resulting moral injuries undermine soldier well-being and thus readiness of the force, suggesting it is in the interest of the services to address these injuries with the same concern as physical ones. Similarly, the prevention--or at least mitigation--of moral injury raises the third challenge which requires not just identifying the traits of good character but also ensuring conditions are met for the successful development of those traits. The fourth and fifth myths address the evolution of warfare, specifically the future challenges technology will pose to the ethic. In this regard, cyberwarfare has opened up an entirely new domain of warfare with different morally relevant features not present in the other physical domains. In doing so, it poses moral challenges largely unfamiliar to many professionals who will have to lead troops in this domain in the very near future. Likewise, the advent of autonomous weapon systems has the potential to erode moral decision-making and accountability while perhaps simultaneously making warfare more humane. As we acquire new technologies, therefore, we must also develop the norms associated with employing them. Acting ethically in war ties my hands and makes winning more difficult--false. Certainly soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have experienced rules of engagement that severely limited their ability to close with and destroy the enemy. More important, applying these rules has placed soldiers at considerable risk, often without any commensurate contribution to victory. In some cases, these rules of engagement have even appeared to limit the enemy's risk while endangering friendly soldiers and the populations they are supposed to protect. These situations arise out of misunderstanding the role military ethics plays. Understanding how the ethics of war aligns with ways of war and how ways of war align with war's ends can resolve this tension. …

@WAR: the rise of the military-Internet complex

Asurprising, page-turning account of how the wars of the future are already being fought today The United States military currently views cyberspace as the fifth domain of warfare (alongside land, air, sea, and space), and the Department of Defense,the National Security Agency, and the CIAall field teams of hackers who can, and do, launch computer virus strikes against enemy targets. In fact, as @WAR shows, U.S. hackers were crucial to our victory in Iraq. Shane Harris delves into the frontlines of Americas new cyber war. As recent revelations have shown, government agencies are joining with tech giants like Google and Facebook to collect vast amounts of information. The military has also formed a new alliance with tech and finance companies to patrol cyberspace, and Harris offers a deeper glimpse into this partnership than we have ever seen before. Finally, Harris explains what the new cybersecurity regime means for all of us, who spend our daily lives bound to the Internet and are vulnerable to its dangers.

Conjectures for framing cyberwarfare

Cyberspace has emerged as a potentially new (and unconventional) domain for warfare. Much debate has focused on understanding cyber conflict. The ability to critically analyse this phenomenon is important; however, the nascent nature of cyberwarfare and the complexity of the systems involved create challenges not met by conventional approaches. As a first step, this requires an analytical construct to frame discussions in a way that highlights distinct characteristics of the cyber domain. An approach proposed is one of the postulating conjectures for debate as a way to achieve this and to demonstrate its use, both at the strategic and operational levels. It is suggested that such an approach provides one component of a mature analytical framework for the analysis of cyber across a range of warfare domains.

Has the United States Lost the Ability to Fight a Major War?

Abstract: The 2015 National Military Strategy identifies war with a major power as a growing possibility. The more the United States demonstrates it is willing and able to undertake a big war, the more unlikely it is that it will have to do so. Thus, the US military should undertake analyses, wargames, and exercises focused on rapid expansion of the force, to include creating new formations. ********** After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States the focus of the American military shifted quickly and dramatically. Previously, most attention was on quick, high-tempo operations against the conventional forces of rogue states. Using advanced technology and exquisitely trained units, the US military was designed to crush state adversaries in short order. Desert Storm was the prevailing paradigm. (1) After September 11, the US intervention in Afghanistan, and the outbreak of insurgency in Iraq in 2003, the American military quickly shifted to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and man hunting. This was a deep and far-ranging change. The human domain of warfare, which had drifted into insignificance during the revolution in military affairs of the 1990s, returned with a vengeance. Conventional forces learned the importance of cultural understanding in counterinsurgency. Special operations forces moved from the periphery to the centerpiece of American military strategy. (2) The military and the intelligence communities fused together to identify opponents and neutralize them. The defense industry provided a massive array of equipment and systems optimized for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. While this was a dramatically different type of activity than anyone had expected, thought about, and prepared for, the US military adapted on the fly. While the American military was learning to fight extremists, insurgents, and terrorists, conventional war was given little thought and effort. As US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq subsided, defense officials and military leaders began redefining their focus once again. This has proved difficult. In the past, adversaries--whether the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents--drove such reorientations and provided a beacon to guide defense policymakers and military leaders. In the contemporary security environment, there is no predominant adversary. This complicates the military's ongoing reorientation since optimizing for one type of conflict or enemy results in suboptimizing for others. What is clear, though, is that the military must prepare for both irregular or state opponents. As the 2015 National Military Strategy stated: For the past decade, our military campaigns primarily have consisted of operations against violent extremist networks. But today, and into the foreseeable future, we must pay greater attention to challenges posed by state actors ... Today, the probability of US involvement in interstate war with a major power is assessed to be low but growing. (3) This is easy--and important--to say, but tough to do in an increasingly austere resource environment. A future interstate war with a major power would not reprise Desert Storm or the 2003 invasion of Iraq in which the US military overwhelmed enemy forces in lightening campaigns with limited American casualties. Chances are it would be costly and possibly long. As the two world wars showed, major powers sometimes go to war expecting a short conflict--a Franco-Prussian War--only to stumble into a long, bloody slogging match. Even though every American wants to avoid this situation, it is important to consider its possibility. Since the National Military Strategy identifies interstate war with a major power as a growing probability, Americans must ask themselves whether the United States could still fight a conflict lasting years and demanding a major expansion of the armed forces. …

The Age of Digital Conflict: A Review Essay

According to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, Internet is among few things humans have built that they do not truly understand. The Internet is a network of networks, a huge and decentralized web of computer systems designed to transmit information using specific standard protocols. Nations and individuals rely on Internet on a daily basis to conduct business, connect with friends, and even find love. To state Internet is an integral part of our way of life is not an overstatement. The Internet allows for friendships, alliances and enmities between states to be extended into virtual world, adding a new and intriguing dimension to traditional statecraft. As Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Martin E. Dempsey stated, the spread of digital technology has not been without consequence. It has also introduced new dangers to our security and our safety. (1) Three books will be reviewed here which highlight addition of Internet to an already complex international system in which combat takes place not only in physical domain but also now in cyber domain. The Department of Defense designated a new domain of warfare in 2011. This elevation in strategic importance makes comparable to land, sea, air, or outer space as a new battle frontier. The US Government and its Armed Forces recognize importance of as a potential future battleground. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated cyberspace is new frontier, full of possibilities to advance security and prosperity in 21st century. And yet, with these possibilities, also come new perils and new dangers. (2) The Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, stated the Department of Defense is adding a new mission: defending nation, when asked, from attacks of significant consequence--those that threaten life, limb, and country's core critical infrastructure. (3) For international jihadists Internet has become most cost-effective means of delivering its messages worldwide, and coordinating attacks. The Internet allows jihadist organizations to recruit without leaving confines of their safe havens. Jihadist groups and terrorist organizations are using Internet as a tool to carry-out their cyberplanning without fear of retaliation and in secret. Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Thomas, an analyst at Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, defines cyberplanning as the digital coordination of an integrated plan stretching across geographical boundaries that may or may not result in bloodshed. (4) An understanding of future armed conflict, combat and intervention in new digital age will help US Army leaders to train its soldiers for new forms of armed conflict in twenty-first in light of sequestration and diminishing defense budget. War Play: Video Games and Future of Armed Conflict How does US military train its current and future soldiers for new forms of armed conflict in twenty-first century in light of sequestration and a diminishing defense budget? Corey Mead's book War Play that military is making use of more and more video games, that is, serious video games, as part of its arsenal of tools to fight wars of future. The military, according to author, is turning to video games for scenarios involving new and unexpected roles for soldiers. For example, today's Generation Z soldiers, born in age of cell phones and information, are using video games to learn skills such as cultural negotiations and cultural sensitive training. As a new generation of soldiers are recruited and deployed, in addition to learning combat skills, they may also have to negotiate with warlords or tribal leaders in remote villages. Also, virtual training sessions are helping military ration training grounds, which are in especially short supply today as troops return from their overseas deployments (68). …

The Coming Financial Wars

ABSTRACT: Since 9/11, the United States has waged a new brand of financial against rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and criminal syndicates. By leveraging American global economic predominance, the US has isolated such actors from the financial system. domain of financial warfare, however, is now no longer the sole province of the US and presents challenges from enemies and competitors. (1) ********** On 8 October 2012, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly bemoaned that the Iranian economy was under direct economic assault, with oil sales cut, bank transfers banned, and the value of the Iranian rial and foreign currency reserves plummeting. He admitted plainly, The enemy has mobilized all its forces to enforce its decision, and so a is underway, on a very far-reaching global scale.... [W]e should realize that this is a kind of through which the enemy assumes it can defeat the Iranian nation. (2) He was right. Over the past decade, the United States waged a new brand of financial warfare, unprecedented in its reach and effectiveness. This hidden war has often been underestimated or misunderstood, but it is no longer secret and has since become central to America's national security doctrine. In a series of economic pressure campaigns, the United States financially squeezed and isolated America's principal enemies of this period--al Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Far from relying solely on the classic sanctions or trade embargoes of old, these campaigns have consisted of a novel set of financial strategies that harness the international financial and commercial systems to ostracize rogue actors and constrict their funding flows, inflicting real pain. America's enemies have realized they have been hit with a new breed of financial power. And they have felt the painful effects. Al Qaeda has found it harder, costlier, and riskier to raise and move money around the world and has had to adapt to find new ways to raise capital for its movement. documents found in Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, reflect a terrorist leader and movement in search of new sources of money. This development was not new--from 9/11 on, the movement struggled to maintain its core financing. In statement after statement--intended for donors and sometimes only for internal consumption--al Qaeda admitted that it has been choked financially. In a 9 July 2005 letter to Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al Qaeda's number two, asked for money, noting that of the lines [of financial assistance] have been cut off. (3) campaign against North Korea had a direct and immediate impact. In the wake of financial pressure unlike any the regime had seen while under international sanctions, North Korea found its bank accounts and illicit financial activity in jeopardy. A North Korean deputy negotiator at the time quietly admitted to a senior White House official, You finally found a way to hurt us. (4) Iranians, too, have suffered the economic effects of a targeted financial assault. On 14 September 2010, former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani urged the Iranian Assembly of Experts to take seriously the painful sanctions and financial pressures imposed by the United States and the international community. Throughout the revolution, he said, we never had so many sanctions [imposed on Iran] and I am calling on you and all officials to take the sanctions seriously. (5) journalist Moises Naim opined that the financial pressures on Iran biting, the sanctions are very very powerful. They are the most sophisticated economic and financial sanctions imposed on a country ever. (6) All of these assaults derive from a blueprint for financial warfare developed years ago by the United States. It is defined by the use of financial tools, pressure, and market forces to leverage the banking sector, private-sector interests, and foreign partners to isolate rogue actors from the international financial and commercial systems and eliminate their funding sources. …

Kyberprostor jako "pátá doména"?

The aim of the article is to present an up-to-date discussion on cyberspace as a new, fifth domain of warfare. The reader is provided with the concept of cyberspace, its current interpretation, primarily in American doctrines and military theory. The army mission is contextually mentioned as well, explicitly the limits of Czech forces capacity. The paper deals with the form of cyberspace and its characteristics in the context of military operations. It advocates the idea of cyberspace as a war domain, which is presented together with the criticism to such approach. The article concludes with the summary and evaluation of both sides' arguments, taking into account the specific role and abilities of armed forces.

Field-Programmable Gated Array Implementation of Split-Radix Fast Fourier Transform for High Throughput

As the signal processing required in electronic warfare (EW) domain is complex and the sample rates to be handled are very high, IP cores which are freely available are not of much use. A study of various fast fourier transform (FFT) algorithms has been carried out and spit-radix FFT has been chosen to be implemented due to fewer multiplications3.This algorithm is attractive to be implemented using field-programmable gated array (FPGA). This paper presents split-radix FFT algorithm for implementation of 512-pt FFT on FPGA platform for EW applications. The algorithm is such designed that it can achieve a throughput of up to 1500 MSPS. 512-pt SRFFT is implemented using parallel pipelined architecture in order to maximize processing speed and thus achieve a throughput of 1500 MSPS with area optimization. The pipeline structure is partitioned to balance the input throughput and to optimize the available FPGA resources. The standard Cooley-Tukey radix-2 FFT algorithm requires N/2 log2 N (for N=512, 2304 multiplications)multiplications and N log2 N additions where as radix-4 FFT requires N/2 log4 N multiplications and N log2 N additions. The SRFFT presented in this paper has a multiplicative complexity of only about two-thirds that of the radix-2 FFT, and is better than the radix-4 FFT or any higher power-of-two radix as well. The initial latency is less than N clock cycles. Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(2), pp.210 -213 , DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj. 63.4266

The Cantar de Mio Cid as Pre-War Propaganda

The Cantar de Mio Cid was probably composed in the first decade of the thirteenth century. This situates it in the years just prior to the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the decisive engagement that ended Almohad dominance in Al-Andalus. The Cantar seems to propagandize Peninsular Christians with regard to military projects that advanced the goals of the Reconquest. There is great emphasis on issues of leadership, recruitment, valor and teamwork, tactics and strategy, fair distribution of loot and lands, and so forth. But the Cantar is also about domestic things: the pursuance of feuds; the vindication of family honor; the arrangement of marriages. This epic, in other words, is also about the home front. In the poem, the real threat to the home front comes from treacherous and meddlesome nobility personified by the Infantes de Carrión. The Cantar exalts a system of royal justice that protects families from such nefarious elements. Aimed at the rank and file, the Cantar's vision of warfare thus promises justice, wealth, and landed property. It also allows men to prove their manhood to the maximum, as we see from the poet's continual emphasis on a gendered division of labor—women assigned to home and hearth, men to the domain of warfare and related activities—and on the virility exemplified by the Cid and his followers.

Cyber Warfare and the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities

The domain of cyber warfare being relatively new, it is not yet matched by any comparatively novel international legal paradigm; the cyber conflicts of the present and (probably) the future therefore fall to be regulated under the existing lex lata. This article, assuming a scenario of international armed conflict, seeks as a specific example to apply the notion of direct participation in hostilities from Additional Protocol I (1977) to cyber war. This aspect of the topic is likely to assume particular importance in light of the contemporary tendency in many developed, Western armed forces to outsource technical specialist work (like information technology) to civilians. Whether or not such civilians can be said to be directly participating in hostilities—based on the accepted constitutive elements of threshold of harm, direct causation and belligerent nexus identified in the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Interpretive Guidance (2005)—will also have implications for the objects and places that could lawfully be targeted in future cyber conflicts.

Naval multi-function radar

The missions expected to be covered by Naval Multi-Function radar (MFR) have increased significantly these last decades. The main evolution of these systems, from a design point of view, have two origins, one the Tactical Picture Compilation (TPC), the other the extension of the warfare domain of weapon systems connected to MFR. As far as TPC is concerned, Long Range coverage and proximity of littoral, have been the major requirements impacting the design of naval MFR. This discusses the principal features of typical architecture for modern Naval Multi-Function radar, and how the requested new missions impact the design.

Towards a Semiotic Information Position Framework for Network Centric Warfare

Semiotics is a field of study that deals with the relationships between representations, intended meanings, and interpretations of signs and symbols. As such, it is of particular relevance to a range of network centric warfare primitives, including data, information, knowledge, awareness, and understanding. In this paper, we apply semiotics to such primitives in the physical, information, cognitive and social network centric warfare domains from the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives. As a result, we present the Semiotic Information Position (SIP) framework and evaluate it through a thought experiment involving a simple command and control scenario.

Rare high cervical gunshot injury presenting as Brown — Sequard syndrome: Management dilemmas

Spinal trauma due to missile/gunshot injuries has been well reported in the literature and has remained the domain of military warfare more often. The chief neurosurgical concern in these types of firearm injuries is the degree of damage sustained during the bullet traversing through the neural tissue and the after effects of the same in long term. Sometimes, though their management can be tricky and may pose certain management dilemmas. We report an interesting case of a penetrating bullet injury to cervical spine at C2 vertebral level presenting as Brown Sequard syndrome. Not only the site was unusual, this patient also posed few treatment related issues. The clinical presentation, imaging and the management of the patient are discussed along with relevant literature regarding gunshot injuries to spine.

Penetrating spinal injuries and their management

Penetrating spinal trauma due to missile/gunshot injuries has been well reported in the literature and has remained the domain of military warfare more often. Civic society's recent upsurge in gunshot injuries has created a dilemma for the treating neurosurgeon in many ways as their management has always involved certain debatable and controversial issues. Both conservative and surgical management of penetrating spinal injuries (PSI) have been practiced widely. The chief neurosurgical concern in these types of firearm injuries is the degree of damage sustained during the bullet traversing through the neural tissue and the after-effects of the same in long term. We had an interesting case of a penetrating bullet injury to cervical spine at C2 vertebral level. He was operated and the bullets were removed from posterior midline approach. Usually, the management of such cases differs from region to region depending on the preference of the surgeon but still certain common principles are followed world over. Thus, we realized the need to review the literature regarding spinal injuries with special emphasis on PSI and to study the recent guidelines for their treatment in light of our case.

Decisions, Decisions … and Even More Decisions: Evaluation of a Digitized Mission Support System in the Land Warfare Domain

Digitized mission support systems are currently being introduced in the military arena. The projected benefits include quicker, better informed, more efficient decision making by the teams using them; however, these claims are often made without appropriate scientific testing. A live operational field trial of a land warfare digital mission support system was observed, and an integrated framework of Human Factors methods was used to evaluate performance with the mission support system. The findings indicated that, as a corollary of various flaws associated with the digital system, decision making was found to be more difficult, more drawn out, and more susceptible to error. Rather than augment the decision-making process, in some cases these flaws were seen to create further decision-making requirements for users. In closing, the implications of this study and the wider naturalistic decision making literature for the design of digitized mission support systems are discussed.

Interruption Recovery Tools for Team Collaboration

Interruptions and situation awareness recovery are important issues in many task domains. Here, we explore the extent to which cognitive design principles for situation awareness recovery that were developed in the air warfare domain can be applied to team mission execution. We developed a tool, called team-CHEX, for presenting and managing messages and for helping users recover situation awareness following interruptions. We report two experiments that compared team-CHEX with two commonly employed mission execution recovery tools – chat and shared whiteboards. The results of the first experiment were used to refine specific interface features of team-CHEX. The final tool was superior to common chat designs and equal to, and in some respects superior to, common whiteboard designs. The revised and extended interruption recovery principles should be useful for the design of both monitoring tasks, such as air warfare, and team collaboration tasks, such as mission execution.

Multisensor deployment using PCRLBS, incorporating sensor deployment and motion uncertainties

Recently, a general framework for sensor resource deployment (Hernandez, et. al. 2004) has been shown to allow efficient and effective utilization of a multisensor system. The basis of this technique is to use the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) to quantify and control the optimal achievable accuracy of target state estimation. In the original formulation (Hernandez, et. al. 2004) it was assumed that the sensor locations were known without error. In the current paper, the authors extend this framework by addressing the issues of imperfect sensor placement and uncertain sensor movement (e.g., sensor drift). The crucial consideration is then how these two forms of uncertainty are factored into the sensor management strategy. If unaccounted for, these uncertainties will render the output of the resource manager inaccurate and overoptimistic. The authors adjust the PCRLB to account for sensor location uncertainty, and we also allow for measurement origin uncertainty due to missed detections and false alarms. The work is motivated by the problem of tracking a submarine by adaptively deploying sonobuoys from a helicopter. Simulation results are presented to show the advantages of accounting for sensor location uncertainty within this focal domain of antisubmarine warfare. The authors note that the generic nature of the technique allows it to be utilized within other problem domains, including tracking ground-based targets using unattended ground sensors (UGSs) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

Chex (Change History Explicit): New HCI Concepts for Change Awareness

Current display technologies do not support users in the critical task of recovering their situation awareness by determining whether situations have changed in meaningful ways. By simply representing the current state of a situation, displays force users to rely on their own ability to extract changes by cognitively integrating events over time. A flood of recent experiments have demonstrated dramatic limitations in these cognitive processes, with humans unable to spot changes in simple scenes, even under optimal monitoring conditions (they show “change blindness”). Here, we develop and empirically evaluate a set of new HCI concepts, collectively called CHEX (Change History Explicit), for supporting improved change awareness in a naval air warfare domain in which users monitor an airspace. CHEX augments the human attentional system with a set of intelligent change detectors whose output is logged in a re-configurable table format that is linked back to the situation display. We show that CHEX is extremely effective both for maintaining situation awareness when monitoring a situation as well as when recovering situation awareness following an interruption. CHEX shows great promise for use in other domains as well.