Improving Battlefield Connectivity for Dismounted Forces

The warfighter couldn’t take it anymore. His team’s mission was to sweep villages, collect fingerprints, photograph irises, and compare these biometric indicators against a registry of known insurgents. Unfortunately, his assigned handheld biometric device lacked the ability to connect to off-site databases. The fact that the warfighter had to rely on the incomplete information in the device’s onboard memory was bad enough, but it enraged him even further, that the darn thing was so slow. Verifying the identity of a single man sometimes took as long as 45 minutes. A sweep of a small village took all day. This annoyed the villagers, and sapped the warfighter’s team of their mobility, which placed them in danger.