The Soldier of the Future 289
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."
More Gear, Drill Sergeant (Score:5, Funny)
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Time to give Apple a DOD Contract? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract? (Score:5, Insightful)
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In the end, being able to fight more safely will end up with us killing more people.
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However, the longer we put off killing people, the worse the mess is going to be when we start again. We will forget and at least one nation is going to start up something really nasty during the next 50 years. Probably a billion people will die.
Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract? (Score:5, Insightful)
WWII started just over 20 years after WWI.
Since 1945, there has been no direct conflict between major powers, no use of nuclear weapons. My mother once told me that she seriously expected WWIII to begin in the 60's. It didn't happen; it still hasn't happened. Maybe we've learned - a little.
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You are correct that we have not had a large war for an unusually long period.
Let's hope for the best and plan for the worst.
Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
As for saving American lives... why does it matter if their American? I'm for saving lives period. I've lived on the other side of the great divide. I've been in the military. I've since decided that it's wrong to think about being just an American citizen and defending this country. To truly move forward we must think of ourselves as global citizens and care for all people. It's when we divide ourselves into groups (American, Iraqi, etc...) that we forget to see the humanity in others.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
This also includes preventing fratricide as well as more precisely labeling enemy combatants. If you are calling in a grid from an old map with a radio and a set of binoculars, there is a margin for error that can lead to the loss of civilian life. Put a laser range finder, GPS, and a digital compass on the soldier and suddenly the individual soldier can call in pinpoint strikes reducing civilian loses.
Honestly, the average soldier over there doesn't want to kill anybody, they just want to help the country rebuild to give the people a better life and come home. I would say that the folks fighting the evil Americans kill more civilians who just want to live their lives like you and I than the US has in this conflict. I was blessed to never have shot at, or been shot at by anybody in the two years I spent over there, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
For the record however, given that the Militant Islamists have killed more civilians for not believing in their cause than the Americans have. Given the choice, I'd rather have their ability to make war diminished far more than ours because I want my children to grow up with at least some freedom and live with significantly less fear as opposed to what they would receive under a regime dominated by Militant Islam.
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To get a DOD bid contract, Apple would be forced to develop a USER FIELD REPLACEABLE battery and any firmware updates would not "brick" the radio once the military unlocked it.
Nah, they would probably just make the entire unit disposable. Logistically, it's simpler to do that and only have one supply chain, than to have to supply both the units themselves *and* the replaceable batteries.
Lots of things in combat zones are moving towards single-use. It's an ecological disaster, but so's war in general.
Re:Time to give Apple a DOD Contract? (Score:5, Funny)
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Apple - Kill Different. (Score:5, Funny)
Defend >
Settings >
Shuffle Tactics >
Helmet Light >
lol (Score:2)
Re:lol (Score:5, Funny)
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Invisibility Cloak (Score:4, Funny)
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hmmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
The soldiers aren't warming up to the suits because they like them. The soldiers are warming up because the suits use Sony batteries.
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Didn't you read the article about the soldier with the dead unit ! Geez read the article !
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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 t
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I rather suspect most of the 15 pounds is probably batteries, given the requirement for 72 hours of uptime or whatever the current one is.
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So, how much does a unit with a GPS, a 700 MHz transceiver, and a PDA weigh, anyways?
You're probably one of those folks who thinks the coffee maker the DoD paid $8,000 for was just a Mr. Coffee, rather than the custom-fitted coffee-tea-soup dispenser built into a cargo plane it actually was. Specialty devices like the Land Warrior gear aren't simply a GPS unit wired to an iPaq and a walkie-talkie with a sack of AA batteries on the side. When you hand devices to grunts, they have to be 1) tough, and 2) easy. That costs money and weight, invariably.
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But then again, I am just a naive taxpayer that hates seeing Uncle Sam pissing away my money.
Re:hmmmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:hmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
You cannot make military equipment semi-disposable.
*There just isn't enough room in the supply chain to handle it.
Military logistics are not trivial matters that can be solved by waving a wand.
Consider two things:
1. The military has been building stuff to mil-spec for decades and has always had supply delays & shortages.
2. To make something semi-disposable, there will be significant increases in the main cost drivers of any "small" budget item: procurement, transport, storage, and tracking. Not to mention repair, which means a support staff.
Semi-disposable = more expensive
All your plan does is shift the costs around and not necessarily in a better way.
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"Hey, guys, could you stop shooting at me for a minute? I have to replace my eyepiece."
The soldier of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The soldier of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The soldier of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The soldier of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's something to be said for numerical superiority, but only if you can project that power. In terms of supply lines, transportation, air cover, mobile communications, etc., China probably can't effectively "field" as many soldiers as the United States. (You haven't really "fielded" anyone if they're sitting in a bunker all day hungry and without enough ammunition.) And when you also take into account technologica
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By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts.
No, you're oversimplifying things. It doesn't come down to simply how many grunts. Technology is a force multiplier, and the "force" in question is essentially manpower. You don't win simply by having more guys, as the effect of assorted force multipliers can make one of hte enemies guys worth five of yours. You can't win with no guys, no matter how much you have in the way of force multipliers, as anything times zero is still zero.
Victory in warfare always comes down to one man standing in front of anot
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After all, you don't have to project power when your enemy is willing to come t
Horde mathematics... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 equipmen
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...will be a machine, which may or may not be controlled by a techie in an air-conditioned office.
Not until said machine is cheaper, more reliable and more versatile than a human in a flak jacket. Which is to say that, for ground work, the infantry are here to stay. Now, if they'd only hurry up and design some workable Mobile Infantry [wikipedia.org] suits... ;)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Five [wikipedia.org]
Re:The soldier of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he will be a guy in "civilian" clothes, with maybe a few magazine pouches clipped to his belt, carrying an AK variant. When the Pentagon's soldiers come hunting, he will not be there. When they aren't expecting trouble, he will suddenly appear to cause them grief. He will deliver his bombs in old Toyotas, instead of planes so expensive that only a handful of them can purchased in any given year by "the world's only remaining superpower". This "soldier of the future" will observe the tactics of his enemies, and will think of cheap ways to thwart them. He will devote most of his waking thoughts to new ways of shorteinging the lives of his technological "superiors"—or perhaps of just making them miserable. Perhaps most importantly, he will keep fighting until he dies, and he is certain that his sons and his sons' sons will keep fighting because his belief in the moral superiority of his cause is unshakeable.
Oh, that's not what you were talking about? You wanted to talk about the gee-whiz high-tech "soldier of the future" because he's the one with the cool toys? Oh, sorry—my mistake. I thought the "soldier of the future" was the one who was going to m> win .
As Einstein said,,, (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:As Einstein said,,, (Score:4, Informative)
For any artifact to generate progress, the people that find it would need the tools to take that thing apart, understand it, and replicate it. Can you, right now, go out there, make your own shopping list, and make an alternator? In theory you could, but in reality you probably can't. I am not even going to ask you to go out there and make your own 8088 chip or even a damn transistor for that matter!
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This *is* WWIV (Score:2)
The Cold War wasn't "almost" WWIII, it was WWIII. The "almost" applies to the end-of-the-world (TM) nuclear war scenario that, thankfully, didn't happen. But the fact that that disaster didn't happen doesn't mean the entire conflict doesn't "count" as a "war". Otherwise, how come we call it "the Cold War"? And it was certainly global in scope, so I figure it deserves to be counted as the next in the series of "Wo
A bit misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Jesus. 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.) Sorry, I don't believe that today's infantrymen are that much bigger and tougher than we were -- the human body hasn't changed, but the amount of crap the brass wants to load onto it keeps going up and up. And this is in the desert! Pretty soon the Iraqis won't have to kill American soldiers, just wait for them to drop dead of heatstroke.
Hear hear. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Consider that in their mind dying in battle is "doing just fine".
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Re:A bit misleading (Score:4, Informative)
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Plenty of Systems seem crap in Version 1.
But give it 5 years.
Let it evolve from being a Lisa into an iMac.
Things get lighter and more robust and more tested and streamlined. It will eventually work well.
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Just before the U.S. turned South Vietnam's "security" over to their own inept government, Americans were testing early "television guided" munitions, laser targeting systems and other outlandish items on North Vietnamese bridges and buildings. One shot, one kill. That was version 0.8b of what we have now. The Soviets wanted the Vietnam war to end more than anyone as they watched advanced battlefield technology, which they couldn't replicate, being developed and tested by the Americans.
All this came to fru
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True. The Soviet backward slide possibly started in earnest as far back as 1980 with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement gaining traction, causing them to eventually lose their grip on the "Iron Curtain" holdings. They exited Afghanistan in 1988 with a little help from CIA supplied Stingers and some other advanced hardware. Desert Shield/Storm was between August 1990 and February 1991. The shooting, and CNN's vivid coverage, started in January. The Soviet Union was dissolved nearly a year after Operatio
Excess Crap (Score:5, Informative)
One of his cartoons depicts two grunts walking down a road littered with discarded gas masks with one saying to the other "I see that C company got the new type gas masks."
He noted that the Brits were much leaner in part because they issued less and in part because they punished company CO's for "waste".
It's always been easy to agree to an extra 6 ounces of gear while sitting at a desk eating lunch. Carrying it and the other 50 6 ounces, now that's a bitch.
Actually it sounds promising (Score:3, Interesting)
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 weigh
It's the eternal problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" (Score:5, Insightful)
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
The story describes how they were continually being equipped with new and advanced weapons. They were constantly delayed while their ships were being refitted. They are constantly discovering that gadgets that seemed wonderful in tests and demonstrations have minor glitches that basically render them useless until the relatively small problems can be solved with them can be solved.
"Given time we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented...."
Re:Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
It's easy to get sucked in by wanting the "best" but the best is expensive, and expensive is always in short supply. Get functional and available first, before you try the sexy crap.
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And there's also an issue, if you're fighting real wars against real opponents, that bigger guns and better armour aren't always the most effective choices. In a FPS, carrying 50 rockets and a launcher might make you the baddest guy on the level, but in real life, it just makes you slow and an easy target. Ask people who've been on the front lines whether they'd rather have a light pack and mobility or a whole bunch of extra armour but only be able to move literally at a crawl, and I imagine you'll get pret
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The trick Russians themselves learned from the Finns during the Winter Wa
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There's some truth to do this, but when it comes down to it the advanced technology available to the US military is a big reason for why its casualty rates are so low compared to what it's been in the past.
Moral neutrality of technology (Score:2, Interesting)
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,
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Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though there are those that are trying that it won't work so let's look at the other questionable options. Chemical weapons? Iraq used those a great deal on Iran and still lost. Nukes? Pick a steep mountain valley and hope your nuke kills more than a few goats and that the guys you are after are not in the next valley (mostly talking about the problems of potentially using them in the Afgan campaign which is one reason they were ruled out in 2001) - or nuke a city and have nothing left to hold but a nuked city and your enemies spread out in the hills just got a powerful new recruitment tool and the goodwill of half the world.
You are talking about dropping nuclear weapons on the city of an ally. You really are not paying attention.
Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Indeed. I believe it was Gandhi who said, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." For a nation with such Christian traditions, the leaders the US elect sure don't act like they believe in Christian values, and even as someone who isn't religious by nature, I'd rather people respected values like "thou shalt not kill" wherever realistic.
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Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of neo-GOP racists we'll have Gandhi's racism? Sweet.
You look at Dick and the neo-Cons but you never look at actual REAL conservatives.
What racism of Gandhi? (Score:3, Insightful)
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You and maybe another 5% of the population tops, maybe. The rest? Forget it. Try hanging out in almost any of the WoW forums for a few hours...you'll see exactly this sort
Re:Moral neutrality of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a naive philosophical ostrich. That level of civilization is not yet possible. It will not ever be possible as long as we have people such as:
- and of course, the people who listen to them
Please stop spouting off garbage until we can resolve the real problem (political greed).Re: (Score:2)
The current fuss is a good example - "our figurehead President we put there to look a bit democratic is hated by American sodomites so he must have scored a moral victory over them" is probably the line getting pushe
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I refuse to single Cheney out in a conversation like this, as both parties are crammed with corrupt power mongers. Single him out in a conversation about him specifically, if you must.
Oh, and the "loony religious right" in Iran is nothing like the "loony religious right" in America. Be very careful to refer to the "{loony
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As for the other bit - the context should be obvious even if you can use loony to describe other people with extreme and sociopathic views.
Pacifism leads to death ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pacifism leads to death unless you have non-pacifists around to protect you. Being reasonable and fair is fine and good, and we should strive for that path, but one must also be willing and able to use deadly force in defense. Even in modern times, over a small number of generations, we have seen a population split, the two halves become isolated, one become pacifist, and when the two halves reestablish contact the pacifists are murdered and/or enlsaved by their blood relatives. Sorry, read this in a book so I don't have a link handy, the people were Pacific islanders, timeframe 19th century IIRC.
Advance of Ignorance (Score:2, Insightful)
Islamists, are not the problem it's the crazy ass people with guns that are the problem.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/when-the-soldie.html [wired.com]
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism [wikipedia.org]
"Islamism is a term used to denote a set of political ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system and its teachings should be preeminent in all facets of society. "
Tim S
Four Ideas Arise From This: (Score:3, Interesting)
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(2) As far as Iraqis (not foreign fighters) there's something to be said for knowing the neighborhood in urban warfare, knowing the language, and actually having local friends. That's why guerilla war works. And remember that the death of an Iraqi can be used to recruit more fighters there, while a US death will work *against* recruiting.
-b.
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2 for 3. Armor adds weight, weight hinders mobility, and mobility protects you better than armor.
stupid, stupid, stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
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How did you come up with that 1000:1 figure exactly? By your thinking, I guess we should just send our troops to war with no training and a $5 ax from Walmart. Then a 1:40 kill ratio will make it financially viable when they come up against,"someone eating rice or falafel who cost all of $200 to train and equip"
Ok, let's consider Land Warrior, the projected cost in gear alone around cancellation time was $70k. Let's round that up t0 $100k to account for the full cost of recruiting, training, equipping, and fielding a soldier. I don't know what the going rate for an AK-47 is in the third world but let's assume around $500, probably a bit high. Ok, so with those numbers an American soldier costs 200x what a local does.
What I'm saying is that each dead American costs us a hell of a lot more than what a dead irregula
AK (Score:2)
Yay for iterative engineering! (Score:2)
1 year into a real war and jaded grunts begin to see the advantages of the system while the designers learn how to make it more useful.
Sounds like iterative design to me!
Take that you UML/waterfall supporters!
Good! (Score:2)
Overlooking the obvious. (Score:2)
It's a unique opportunity that few other military powers have had access to
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Oh, and 'idnoclip' for finding Bin-Laden.
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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