One thing that militaries strive for is having a good situational awareness in the battlefield. This means removing the fog of war, ability to coordinate friendly units, and mark where enemy units are before the friendly units fix and finish them off. Slovenia's S&T Defence's Battle Eye System, which is intended to be used by NATO forces and allies, was built specifically for that purpose, and was used in the recent airsoft milsim event called Operation OPFOR which we have featured here.

Operation OPFOR teams were equipped with C2 software in the previous years. But as mentioned, in the OPFOR AAR, a system based on the Battle Eye System, and called Personal Eye System (PES) was deployed in this year's Operation OPFOR. According to Matevz Ferjancic, who dropped us an email to inform us that another company, called Mil Sistemika, will be in charge of the civilian PES and released as an Android application. There is no word about an iOS version, but NATO members, especially the U.S. are actually making such systems using Android rather than iOS. That could be a reason for such release for the Android mobile OS.

Just like its bigger brother, the PES is designed to enable "teams to see the movement of friendly forces, to report activities in standardized formats and to track the movement/sightings of enemy." We have seen a software before that's more based on Java-enabled phones, but the PES uses full blown mobile smart gadgets, such as tablets and smartphones which have a lot of computing power.

Whilst it's now available at the Google Play Market as demo version, and the details on how the PES will work for your airsoft event is explained there:

Personal Eye System is a personal tracking, military navigation and tactical data sharing application aimed at soldiers, police, security forces, emergency services and others that need topographic land or sea navigation, tracking, blue force tracking - BFT, and common operational picture sharing - COP. PES was designed by the active soldiers, as a substitute for a traditional GPS receiver, paper map and a mobile phone. It serves a similar purpose as TacNAV for IOS. You can find more information about PES on PES website at: http://pes.milsistemika.com PES is currently being evaluated by the Slovenian armed forces, Police and National Crisis Management Center as a part of their Battlefield Management System - BMS.

PES can share COP data, such as POI, unit positions, track reports etc. directly user-to-user, (using SMS or email) or dynamically over a PES COP sharing server. Later options offers a military grade Blue Force Tracking, and data sharing. PES Server, serves as a common operational picture database. PES clients can connect to the server in order to upload local tactical data, and download common operational picture.

Free version is limited to 1 route, 30min track recording, 10 map objects maximum, and no server connection. Please buy full version directly from the application "Manage Features" menu. PES server account can be purchased from the PES portal.

Using the PES is not a one-off purchase as there will be user licenses that will need to be purchased for the application to used in a team or an event of a big number of players. You can check the user licenses here and find out if their pricing is reasonable enough to be used for your milsim event.

For more details you can contact Mil Sistemika on using the PES.