Designing Military Vehicles for a Battlefield Characterized by Drones

The modern battlefield is increasingly characterized by the use of small drones. As such, military vehicles must now be designed to account for this threat. This paper presents a model-based systems engineering approach to identify vehicle vulnerabilities and generate new vehicle requirements to mitigate them. This approach uses a standard set of System Modeling Language diagrams. A vehicle’s primary roles are captured in a series of use cases. Each use case is characterized by a sequence of activities performed by the vehicle. These activity sequences are captured in an activity diagram, which are used to wargame how a drone can exploit the vehicle at each phase. Each potential exploitation is assigned likelihood and severity scores, which feed into a risk index. This risk index is then used to prioritize each vulnerability. From these vulnerabilities, a set of operational requirements are derived, which then informs the development of system requirements. As the system matures, the physical system architecture can also be used to identify drone vulnerabilities. In particular, the small payloads carried by drones are most effective when targeting interfaces. Internal block diagrams and domain diagrams are used to evaluate each interface to determine its vulnerability to drone attack, which can then be incorporated into the design requirements. This paper applies the methodology to an autonomous pontoon bridging system intended to move military vehicles across a wet-gap. A number of key vulnerabilities are identified, leading to a series of new design requirements.