Tracking troop movement

Army officials conceived of Blue Force Tracking in 1994 to give commanders and soldiers improved situational awareness, or knowledge on the battlefield. The color-screen device shows friendly forces as blue icons and enemy troops as red ones on maps and satellite

images.

Army officials want commanders to see battles as they occur and visualize future ones. They also wants soldiers to find and destroy enemy forces instead of constantly communicating enemy coordinates.

Blue Force Tracking consists of hardware, software and communications systems. The hardware includes the CPU, display and keyboard. Software includes 3 million lines of code written in C and C++ running on the Sun Microsystems Inc. Solaris operating system.

The Blue Force Tracking system communicates with commanders and troops using a Global Positioning System device in the vehicle and an antenna outside it.