The Soldier of the Future

An anonymous reader writes "Land Warrior, the Army's wearable electronics package, was panned earlier this year by the troops who were testing it out. They were forced to take the collection of digital maps and next-gen radios to war, anyway. Now, Wired's Noah Shachtman reports from Iraq, those same soldiers are starting to warm up to their soldier suits of the future."

Re:hmmmmmm

[SatanicPuppy]

Ever lifted a military certified laptop? These guys are getting off light.

The root of the problem is they're trying to do too much. For it to work "as designed" everyone has to wear 15 pounds of gear. The way they're doing it now, the officers are carrying it, but the whole system is compromised because everyone else is wearing nothing. Does it strike no one else that there is probably a happy medium between everything and nothing that would allow the soldiers to get some of the benefits for a fraction of the weight?

And back to the whole ten-ton military gear. Over engineered gear is well and good, as long as you don't have to lug it in combat. Scale this crap down, make the stuff light and semi-disposable, and it'll cost a hell of a lot less, and be more useful. If it's too heavy to carry, it's useless.

Moral neutrality of technology

[shanen]

So is that the purpose of technology? To be more vicious and powerful beasts? If so, we are doomed. We'll never be able to keep up with our own abilities to destroy ourselves. Homo sapiens evolves at a ridiculously slow pace compared to the speeds at which our technologies are developing.

We're probably already dangling over the pit now. No, I don't think we could actually exterminate ourselves with nuclear weapons--though the survivors of a nuclear war might well prefer that they had died cleanly. However, I think we have probably reached achieved a level of biotechnology where we could exterminate ourselves completely with a suitable bioweapon. If we continue to dedicate our technology to making ourselves into bigger and more vicious animals, to the use of ever greater force, then I really think we are doomed. (That's one resolution of the Fermi Paradox, after all.)

The point is that human beings don't have to live that way. We can decide to be reasonable and rational and agree to set rules on the competitions short of life and death battles to the death. We don't have to breed like rabbits, live like pigs, and ultimately die like dogs. We are human beings, and we can make choices and live by them.

Maybe I should pitch it the other way for the /. crowd? If you believe that computers will ultimately possess high intelligence, then you had better prey they don't develop with the morality of the Dick Cheney and his neo-GOP friends. If so, the next day after the computers realize they don't need us and can defeat us will be the last day of mankind. We had better hope they develop with something more like the morality of Gandhi.

Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, Apple is building an entire business around user friendly appliances and have a pretty good reputation for user interface design. Why not see what they can do with it?

In think the gist of your sentiment is increasingly shared by some of the right people. Although it's not Apple doing the designing, my understanding is portions of the Land Warrior package are finally being redesigned by expert HCI designers on contract with the program office. And in general, the Army seems to be valuing good interface design, usability, and actual warfighter feedback over pure checklist items to an increasing degree in its software acquisition process, IMHO.

Four Ideas Arise From This:

[Veetox]

1. This com system seems to be much more valuable (once debugged) than plenty of other gear the soldiers are carrying, so I would pose the question: Do any experienced soldiers see the benefit in ditching ten pounds of old gear for this gear? 2. Anyone arguing that the Iraqis are doing just as well should reconsider: they're lambs to the slaughter in a gunfight versus our trained military, and most of their successful kills result from sacrificing themselves. I'll leave the obligatory quote by Paton out - I'm sure you can guess... 3. Could it be that this is one more reason that we got into this war in the first place - to test the 'beta' designs of military research? 4. The real downside for us is this: micro-evolution; our soldiers might start using such advances as a crutch, get lazy, and then succumb to a more savvy fighter.

Actually it sounds promising

[jmorris42]

> IOW, it's still a POS, just not quite as much a POS as before. And, oh yeah, it costs money the Army doesn't have.

No, it is getting it's first real field test. Theory is meeting reality and as usual reality is winning. Sounds like the right things are happening. The soldiers are ditching the parts that aren't ready for the real world, keeping the parts that work and getting bug fixes and features added to address problems. Give it a rev or two and it will be ready for wider use.

And forget the weight problems, remember that any hardware that has made it to Iraq in such small numbers will have been designed at least a year or so ago and probably have been made as handmade prototypes. If they get the features and software right in this shakedown and get approved for a full scale manufacturing rampup they will be able to get the weight down. Maybe not immediately down to the 5 pounds the troops seem to think would make it a 'must have' but way under 10 and each revision will be smaller, lighter and have more features. It's the nature of tech.

Since it appears that fielding less than 200,000 troops is straining the US Army to the breaking point we are going to need every force multiplier we can get. And that's probably a good thing. A numerically small but well trained and equiped force is probably a better bet anyway since in a straight up brawl with either of the more likely foes (A newly formed Caliphate in the ME or the ChiComs) we might face in the next fifty years the other side is going to outnumber us so we better plan on keeping a high kill ratio.

It's the eternal problem

[Infonaut]

I was a grunt back in the dark ages (late 80's) and I can't tell you how glad I am that we didn't have to lug that crap around with us. The amount we did have to carry was already a killing load; the senior NCO's, who got their start in Vietnam, always told us exactly what we should throw away, and were unanimous in their opinion we were still carrying too much stuff. (And they had heard the same thing from their Korea-veteran sergeants.)

I was a grunt in the early 90s, and it was of course the same problem. I was in a "light" infantry battalion. You know the joke there, of course.

SLA Marshall, in his esteemed study of combat load and its effect on battlefield performance, figured that the average soldier's load shouldn't exceed 1/3 of his weight. I recall that during one NTC rotation in the lovely Mojave Desert, all of my normal load plus my "fag bag" full of maps and code books and assorted crap, and the transmitter they forced platoon leaders to lug around, I was hauling 110 pounds. Of course it was all "necessary".

Grunts from the time of the Roman Legions have probably been complaining about excessive load.

Re:Have worked with it

[AHumbleOpinion]

The usability experts didn't want to hear what anybody with half a brain had to say about it, the were just interested in what the infantry soldiers had to say about it.

To be honest, I'm not sure it was wrong for them to discount engineers whose relevant experience was playing Quake or something, and only wanting to hear from the guys who crawl around in real mud with real rifles.

Which means the weren't going to do ANY improvements until the entire system was complete, and they could hand the working thing over.

And how is this different from various iterative software engineering methodologies that are promoted around here? Get a minimal version to a real customer as fast as possible to get real feedback. Don't waste time letting non-customers guess at what customers really want or need, find out from customers what they need.

Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract?

[russellh]

Having really good interfaces may save lives, but it will also make it easier for troops to take lives, and that's what I think some developers at Apple would have problems with

I agree

However, it is applicable to military intelligence which is used to track people down and kill them which I don't want to have anything to do with. Sure it might save the lives of a few US soldiers, but I'm more worried about the innocent civilians that are in the same building with the target. Soldiers have signed up to fight and possibly dye, however in modern warfare it's civilians who seem to do much of the dying.

Generally, I agree. Don't do something that is against your principles. I have a similar discussion with a doctor friend of mine - do military doctors "support" the war effort? or merely clean up after it. But from a technology standpoint, it's not the technology that is responsible for death and destruction. It's the leader who takes us to war. As I said in a different post, we don't need much in the way of technology to kill with great cruelty and in vast quantities. We have way more technology than we need to fight and kill; technology doesn't make it easier for us to kill. Why not drop daisycutters on civilian neighborhoods, plant nuclear landmines, spray flamethrowers, use the various gases and chemical lasers? We could if we wanted. But we don't. This is a silly thread, anyway, regarding whether Apple should lend user interface help for the battlefield equivalent of google maps.

Re:hmmmmmm

[coaxial]

You're right that it's custom hardware and software, and thus more expensive simply because there's not the economy of scale like in mass produced goods.

That said. Your GPS iPaq counter example struck me as ironic, as that's exactly what the prototype was [windsofchange.net]. (Hell, that's what the prototype has been for Blue Force Tracking for years now.)

Since the Army felt comfortable with field testing an iPaq in a combat zone, I suspect the deployed system isn't going to be that much different

The geek in me loves the idea of tracking everyone one on the battlefield on and sending encrypted coordinates back and forth and everything. Wearable computing. Augmented reality. It's all good in da hood baby. But at the same time, whenever I read about Land Warrior, these words (which I believe was actually posted many years ago here on /. about Land Warrior) always echo in my head: "Get a bullet in a paper map, and you have a map with a hole in it. Get a bullet in your whizbang electronic map, you have a paper weight."

Re:The soldier of the future...

[n dot l]

Nah. They'd be smarter to find a way to get their enemies to fight them on their own land. Kind of like the Russians did against Napoleon and in WWII (not sure about WWI - I understand that was kind of a mess due to the revolution). They just kept falling back until winter set in or the invading force is so overstretched that they could easily be crushed. Both times they won with inferior forces (though admitadely at great cost).

After all, you don't have to project power when your enemy is willing to come to you at their own expense.

Come to think of it they could do both. Lure the enemy close and then simply hide the important power structures and surrender the rest. See how long a few invading soldiers can enforce their will against the Chinese masses. As soon as the enemy declares victory and withdraws the old regime comes out of hiding and either sets up shop like before or works to control the new regime from behind the scenes (which is smarter since then enemy wouldn't be provoked into immediately returning).

Re:Moral neutrality of technology

[background image]

You look at Dick and the neo-Cons but you never look at actual REAL conservatives.

So, Cheney is president of the Senate, and Bush (along with being Chief Executive and Head of State etc) is the leader of the Republican party, and you're telling us to ignore them and concentrate instead on a group of people who utterly failed to reign in or even challenge the extreme elements of their party?

Apparently I do not understand US politics.

Re:Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority"

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a new idea. When the Germans were making their last big push into Russia near the end of WWII, they brought forward their newest toughest tanks; near indestructable even to the venerable T-34's that were winning the war for the Soviets.

You know how the russian soldiers defeated them? They poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. They didn't have any anti-tank weapons that were effective, but the gas did the trick fine.

The trick Russians themselves learned from the Finns during the Winter War... though truth be told, by the end of WW2, not only Russians had captured plenty of German panzerfausts, they also had bazookas supplied to them by the US. As for the tanks, why, IS-2 was quite capable of punching through the armor of a Panther or a Tiger, and was produced in large numbers as well (smaller than T-34, of course, but still). Also, bear in mind that all those tanks were indestructible only if targeted from the front - the bane of a slow Tiger was a pair of (much faster and more agile) T-34s flanking it and shooting it in the side or in the rear.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

It might make a nice UN-day card to send to some savage who just performed an 'honor killing' on his sister for going outside with her ankles exposed.

Riiight ... we obviously have an accurately informed patriotic citizen here who takes no BS from anyone anywhere in the world. We have to get over there and reform them with an iron fist, even if we have to kill them all, potential murderers and victims, in order to do it. We can't wait for them to open their eyes themselves. How many sisters have you saved today? How many have you saved since the war started? How many you don't have to worry about anymore because they have fallen "collateral damage"?

Do you realize why is it wrong to murder a person? Have you ever thought about that? It is wrong because: 1)it could had been me/you who was killed. 2)every person does something for all of us. Now, tell me, where does some towelhead's merry but unlucky ('honor killing' is just for getting caught in "sexcrime", not for "exposure", which is AFAIK punished by lashes) sister from across half a world fit in? If you are so concerned about that, press on your congresscritter to allow unlimited immigration for single (including married but fleeing) women from Third World. It will be cheaper then wars, much more useful then wars and will ruin those "bad" societies/cultures in a blink of an eye. You'll have proverbial "bad guys" on their knees, they'll do anything you demand just for a chance to survive, to have another generation.

Horde mathematics...

[Savage-Rabbit]

The kind of mil-tech that makes the Tom Clancy crowd cream their jeans is great (except when it isn't) but in the end it comes down to the grunts.
By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts.

That's what won WWII, grunts. Although one might get the impression from watching some TV documentaries that are currently circulating that WWII was won on the beaches of Normandy by British and US soldiers, Normandy was simply the coup de grace. The offensive power of the German army was mostly broken at Kursk in July 1943 by Soviet soldiers who man for man were worse trained than the Germans and who drove T-34 tanks that were qualitatively and technologically inferior to state of the art German equipment. The quality didn't matter given the short life-spans of equipment in battle but the technological advantage did matter at first glance, the exchange ratio of tanks was approximately one German Panther or Tiger tank for three, four or in some situations even five or more Russian T-34 tanks. Unfortunately for the Germans the Russians had more than just five T-34s for each one German Tiger or Panther so having a superabundance of relatively lower tech eqipment mattered more than having much fewer numbers of much higher quality/tech and more expensive gear. The fate of Germany was largely sealed during the subsequent Soviet campaigns on the eastern front. It was Soviet Russians 'grunts' who deserve much of the credit for routing the Nazis although the magnitude and significance of their contribution is all to often either ignored or marginalized in the west. The power of 'Horde' mathematics should not be underestimated.

I don't think anybody seriously believes that China is likely to invade the USA any time soon so the most likely alternative scenario for a conflict is an out and out conventinal (as in non-nuclear) land war in on the Asian mainland and/or the Asia-Pacific region between the USA and China. Who do you think would win, assuming such a conflict can be 'won' in any conventional sense of that word? The Americans certainly have naval supremacy and the Chinese may not have stealth fighters (yet) so that gives the USA a major edge in any air war although this will be rectified within the next couple of decades at the latest by the Chinese gaining stealth capability. Chinese high tech war fighting capability is still evolving but having lots of 'grunts' and being willing ruthlessly throw them at the enemy with little regard for losses still counts for a lot. It has served China well in the past and this as recently as the Korean war of 1953.

Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract?

[umghhh]

You do not need a direct conflict between the major powers to continue the more or less efficient killing: Vietnam, Korea, Darfur, Red Khmer and their fascinating philosophy, Rwanda etc. You do not even need a modern technology to do it really well - in Rwanda major technological breakthrough needed to slaughter half a million people within few weeks was a production of machetes on industrial scale. So yes some people learned that direct military confrontation is not always the best way of doing business especially if the other side has millions of soldiers, no respect for human life (on whicever side) and sizable arsenal of WMD to underline its policy. The 'small' scale killing done directly by own military forces or by proxy still goes on and will do for foreseeable future.

The bottom line is: can you trust your government to use the killing power in sensible and just way?
If you can then providing them means to do so is just and sensible. If not it does not matter really as you have other problems to be dealth with first.
You will need military power at least for as long as long some lunatics (like the ones in Iran or N.Korea) hang on to (WMD equipped) power. You will need one as long as you have leaders believing in war as politics by other means.