Disruptive By Design: Body Cameras Could Be a Win for the Military

Public outrage over police misconduct has boosted the number of appeals for police departments across the United States to equip patrol officers with body cameras. As a result, the U.S. Justice Department announced a $20 million endeavor to supply law enforcement nationwide with the devices. Amid such efforts, now is a good time to examine the pros and cons of equipping U.S. troops with body cameras.

The Defense Department has not yet mandated use of body cameras across the services, though efforts to modernize ground forces have indicated some demand for the technology. For example, the Army’s Land Warrior system employs a number of sensors, including video cameras, and a limited number of troops already use them. But security concerns such as tactical video footage falling into enemy hands or being exploited for anti-U.S. military propaganda have prevented leaders from requiring troops to video record their actions. If the incidents in Baltimore, Cleveland and Ferguson, Missouri, tell us anything—it is that a video can dramatically alter public perception of an event.

Public accountability is the main reason that the military might want to equip its forces with body cameras. Footage could help officials dispel negative portrayals of U.S. combat actions, for instance. Furthermore, as with the police, the military scrutinizes every violent engagement to ensure that troops acted appropriately and limited undue civilian harm and suffering. In a time of instant news feeds and viral videos, military use of body cameras could protect the forces’ image and preserve U.S. soft power. Media-savvy adversaries seek to portray military actions as excessively destructive. By recording and presenting actual footage from combat engagements, the military could counter such negative propaganda.

Additionally, footage could be used for after-action reviews and self-policing. Law enforcement agencies that have adopted use of body cameras noted significant benefits. For example, Birmingham, Alabama, police reported a 70 percent decrease in citizen complaints and a 34 percent decrease in the use of force by officers after deploying 319 cameras in June. Body cameras used during security operations could similarly help military forces. The Hawthorne effect is alive and well: People improve their behavior if they think their actions might be observed.

The cameras also could serve as powerful training aids. To date, this has been the primary military use of body cameras. Recordings let individuals and teams review their actions, both from a first-person perspective and from teammates’ angles. Watching their own performance, as well as their teammates, lets trainees and veterans evaluate what went wrong and what went right.

Before large-scale adoption, however, a number of concerns must be addressed. Both police and military officials have expressed worry that use of body cameras will infringe on privacy rights. Body cameras can capture embarrassing information, which means officials must develop suitable policies to protect the privacy of wearers and the public. In addition, military communicators soon will have to take on the challenges of integrating body cameras into tactical command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems.

What military communicators will need in the future depends on the glut of data produced and the nature of new programs to tag content in video and image search engines, making the data more useful if easily searchable. New analytics systems should include as much automation and metatagging identification as possible, and future systems should leverage emerging object recognition programs that can identify people, places and things. New back-end infrastructure is needed to store and organize this raw data, but the challenge could prove more than worthwhile because other applications could extract useful information beyond the first-person experience generated by the body camera.

Developers of military body camera systems should consider how background data can be integrated into future C4ISR situational awareness platforms. Perhaps data could be collated to produce a cohesive understanding, with big data applications analyzing environmental factors in the recordings to reveal trends otherwise imperceptible to humans.

Military use would follow the sensor proliferation trend happening commercially through the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). When combined with supercomputers capable of machine learning, body camera video recordings might offer another trove of sensor information from which machines could gain new knowledge. In the military, the IoT will affect body camera usage through connections to wearable devices. Already, troops are exposed to augmented and mediated reality via tactical head-mounted display platforms, which will be fielded more frequently over the next three to five years. When body cameras are integrated with these systems, troops could analyze video feeds in real time, alerting tactical users to the presence of both threats and friendly forces.

Soon, body cameras might become mandatory for law enforcement. The requirement might not be such a bad thing.

Maj. Ryan Kenny, USA, attends the College of Naval Command and Staff of the U.S. Naval War College and is a researcher with its Gravely Naval Warfare Research Group. He created an online forum to foster discussions on emerging technologies at www.militarycommunicators.org. The views expressed here are his alone and do not represent the views and opinions of the Defense Department, U.S. Army or other organizations.