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Since the beginning, the Italian Army General Staff has been following with much interest the development of a concept for a future soldier system in the allied context, as well as, and more recently, the programmes launched in this field by some Countries and the technological and operational aspects being developed by some other nations. The main reasons of our interest are, first of all, to enhance the operational capability of dismounted soldiers, not so much to increase the lethality and the protection of individuals, as, most of all, for the integration of soldier's key capability areas as well as for his integration into the battlefield digitalized command and control system. As a matter of fact the wide integration concept increases the command and coordination possibilities, which means a greater operational effectiveness, notably of small units that, in close combat situations, have less time to react and operate.
Secondly, the possibility of assigning a more important role to dismounted soldiers aroused just when the current medium-long term operational scenarios emerged in a more realistic way, in whose context dismounted soldiers and squad/platoon level units play the lead. In fact, those scenarios are essentially characterised by two fundamental elemerits (the growing urbanisation, that will make more and more frequent the operations in a urban context, and crisis prevention and peace support operations, which means, in general, low intensity operations) that, due to their peculiarities, make dismounted soldiers and squad/platoon level units the resolving element, provided that they can act in an effective C4I context.
Moreover, crisis prevention and peace support operations, representing the operational engagements that are more likely to occur in the medium-long term, will mostly have a multinational dimension which means that, in order to be effective and have real interoperability capability in a multinational environment, similar units must have the same operational standards.
In the light of such considerations, the Italian Army Staff decided to equip its own dismounted units with an integrated soldier system, while creating a specific working group aimed at defining the system operational requirement and evaluating its impact on the Army organisation, in connection with doctrine, training, recruitment and logistics related aspects as well as taking into account units organisational structure.
The Italian Army Staff will constantly exert...