WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE — The future is now for the Air Force’s development of new technology for troops on the battlefield.

A new plan known as Technology Horizons sketches the Air Force’s major science and technology objectives for the next decade. They include developing highly adaptable, self-governing systems that can make decisions about their battle space capabilities. That envisions aircraft that could sense their battle damage and assess their remaining capabilities, Air Force officials said.

The plan’s goals also include electronic interfaces that could pick up the military person’s brainwaves and quickly react to a sensor image of a potential battlefield threat.

“To identify threats in full-motion video, we can outfit a helmet with literally hundreds of brainwave sensors and begin to localize and identify reactions you have, even below the level at which you could put them into words,” Werner Dahm, the Air Force’s chief scientist, said earlier this month in Washington, D.C.

Air Force Research Laboratory engineers are to use the Technology Horizons document to plan future development strategies, which industry could support with its innovation capabilities. The AFRL has its headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.