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SD is defined as a failure to sense correctly the attitude, motion, and/or position of the aircraft with respect to the surface of the earth (Benson, 2003). The types of SD are generally thought to be “unrecognized” and “recognized” (Previc & Ercoline, 2004). Although a third type has been reported (incapacitating), this type seems irrelevant to UAV operations. Unrecognized SD occurs when the person at the controls is unaware that a change in the motion/attitude of the aircraft has taken place. The cause is often the result of a combination of sub-threshold motion and inattention. This type of SD is known to be the single most serious human factors reason for aircraft accidents today, accounting for roughly 90% of all known SD-related mishaps (Davenport, 2000). Recognized SD occurs when a noticeable conflict is created between the actual motion/attitude of the aircraft and any one of the common physiological sensory mechanisms (e.g., visual, vestibular, auditory, and tactile). Recognized SD is the most common type of SD, accounting for the remaining SD-related accidents.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Each of the four objectives can be applied within the military training environment. Military training often requires that soldiers achieve specific levels of performance or proficiency in each phase of training. For example, training courses impose entrance and graduation criteria, and awards are given for excellence in military performance. Frequently, training devices, training media, and training evaluators or observers also directly support the need to diagnose performance strengths and weaknesses. Training measures may be used as indices of performance, and to indicate the need for additional or remedial training.

Human performance, particularly that of the warfighter, has been the subject of a large amount of research during the past few decades. For example, in the Medline database of medical and psychological research, 1,061 papers had been published on the topic of “military performance” as of October 2003. Because warfighters are often pushed to physiological and mental extremes, a study of their performance provides a unique glimpse of the interplay of a wide variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on the functioning of the human brain and body. Unfortunately, it has proven very difficult to build performance models that can adequately incorporate the myriad of physiological, medical, social, and cognitive factors that influence behavior in extreme conditions. The chief purpose of this chapter is to provide a neurobiological (neurochemical) framework for building and integrating warfighter performance models in the physiological, medical, social, and cognitive areas. This framework should be relevant to all other professionals who routinely operate in extreme environments. The secondary purpose of this chapter is to recommend various performance metrics that can be linked to specific neurochemical states and can accordingly strengthen and extend the scope of the neurochemical model.

This chapter restores the concepts of freedom, consciousness, and choice to our understanding of “economic laws,” so we may discuss how to respond to economic crisis. These are absent from orthodox economics that presents “globalization” or “the markets” as the outcome of unstoppable forces outside human control.

They were integral to the emancipatory political economy of Karl Marx but have been lost to Marxism, which appears as the inspiration for mechanical, fatalistic determinism. This confusion arises from Marxism's absorption of the idea, originating in French positivism, that social laws are automatic and inevitable.

The chapter contests the organizing principle of this view: that economic laws are predictive, telling us what must happen. Marx's laws are relational, not predictive, laying bare the connection between two apparently distinct forms of appearance of the same thing, such as labor and price. Such laws open the door to democracy and choice, but do not unambiguously predict the future because what happens depends on our actions.

The commodity form conceals these laws, disguising the true social and class relations of society. Accumulation, however, undermines the circumstances that permit the commodity to play this role. The result is crisis, defined in this chapter as the point when the blind laws of the commodity form are suspended and open political forces come into play.

In past crises, capitalism has restored the rate of profit through such destructive interventions as imperialism, war, and fascism. Economic laws, properly defined, offer society the real choice of alternative outcomes from crisis.