Estimation of Laser Dazzle Effects on Shooting Performance

The human eye is an indispensable sensor for the execution of many military tasks, and a degraded vision would undoubtedly affect operator task performance. Dazzling the eye with a visible light source is for that reason an obvious countermeasure when trying to affect human vision and possibly degrade human performance. The effects are most often translated into a decrease of the field-of-view of the eye, but the question remains how this translates into human task performance degradation and secondly how accurate this degradation can be predicted. This study will try to quantify the performance degradation of a shooting task in a land environment when being dazzled by a green portable laser system. A measurement campaign has been organized to answer this question; every participant of the test group, composed of 14 persons, was asked to fire 5 shots in the direction of a competition-type target straight ahead, with and without dazzle. The registered time and scoring of the specific tests have been statistically analyzed to determine the significant effects, and the outcome has been compared with a predicted dazzle impact. The results of the shooting test show that the used laser dazzle prediction models quite well the human performance degradation and, at the same time, that there is a need for a specific test protocol to find the correct compromise between environmental validity of a trial and the number of independent variables that can be controlled.