A Retrospective Analysis of Lessons Learned in Evaluating Advanced Military Technologies

For the past 6 years, personnel from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have served as the independent evaluation team for two major Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) programs. DARPA ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology) is an advanced technology research and development program whose objective is to exploit soldier-worn sensors to augment a soldier’s situational awareness, mission recall, and reporting capability in order to enhance situational knowledge during and following military operations. TRANSTAC (Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use) is another DARPA program, whose goal is to demonstrate capabilities for rapidly developing and fielding free-form, two-way speech-to-speech translation systems that enable Englishand foreign-language speakers to communicate with one another in real-world tactical situations where an interpreter is unavailable. Both of these efforts are concluding, so this article focuses on overall lessons learned in evaluating these types of technologies.