Slashdot Mirror
New and Improved - SmarTruck II
jmoriarty writes "The Army's next generation SmarTruck is on display in Detroit. The original version of the SmarTruck was covered back in May, but the Army now admits that version was 'hardly ready for the real world'. Apparently the real world version needed interchangable nodules, and the absolute must-have for every Slashdotter's vehicle - a 'hacker in a box'."
...or is the military run by 7-year-old boys? In third grade, I too would have been very excited about a truck with missile launchers and a huge artillery system termed "Crusader".
Don't even get me started on the names of operations. "Infinite Justice", anybody? It sounds like something out of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
This is deceptively like taking a standard flatbed truck, with no fancy cab interior, providing an easy way to link the cab to the bed (oh, like say a data and power cable or 2), then tossing on/in any old modular box for the mission...
Humm, didn't we do this with the HEMTT series? The MTV series, hell even the old 2.5 ton series (complete with "modular" 5 ton wrecker for mobility to/from the motorpool), the list goes on.
Oh, just noticed from the article, they cost more. Wow, some innovation.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Over-exposed schoolgirl victim of high-tech bullying
It includes a computer program linked with surveillance equipment to monitor what people in the area around the vehicle are saying in e-mail
Excuse me? Why do you need a truck to monitor email? Wouldn't it be safer to monitor email from afar?
Insert a chemical or biological agent of your choice into a base substance of similar consitency and you have yourself a bringer of mass death on wheels.
The pepper spray bit in the article is just to make you feel Warm And Fuzzy because you know how much They Care.
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.
To me this just seems up there with the color coding terror warning system; something to make it look like the people in charge are making us safer but without any real effect.
What role would this truck ever really play in the army? It seems to me that the curent Humvee is probably modular enough to perform any of the tasks that the SmarTruck is designed for.
Oh well, who really expects common sense from the government, if it's for the army of course its a good idea.
Look, it's got some nice bells and whistles, but hand me an RPG or drive this over a mine and all it'll be good for in the future is roasting marshmallows. Wouldn't it make a hell of a lot more sense to mount this sort of electronic warfare gear onto Humvees or (better yet) APCs? Which vehicle would you rather have when even the Somali militia opens up on you, much less anyone with training?
The general quoted in the interview acknowledged that there was no mission in mind for the first generation SmarTruck. Well, that's the mission for this thing? A next-gen friendly casualty generator?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Is anyone else a little skeptical of the "read all e-mails sent near the truck" capability? Have they not heard of encryption?
Maybe they are using van Eck (Tempest) phreaking. (Google it if you don't know what it is.)
If one could capture what was on someone else's monitor, a computer could OCR it easy enough. A computer could probably locate the signal, as well. This would provide for the possibility of an automatic capture system.
Also, since you generally don't type e-mail in encrypted form, it's irrelevent.
This is just speculation, mind you.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
This is a vehicle designed for URBAN combat and survellience. Monitoring email? Sounds like TEMPEST stuff. This vehicle would be used against new threats...like domestic terrorism hmmmm? Do you want the US military performing survellience on home soil? THINK about this people instead of making kiddie toy jokes...
Damn.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
I thought the U.S. Army was part of the Department of "Defense"[sic]. As such shouldn't the Army's goal be to defend the US from foreign enemies?
With the Posse Comitatus Act still supposedly intact, why does the Army need a vehicle that is obviously aimed at use against a civilian populace?
Or is the Posse Comitatus Act, like our Bill of Rights and getting honest answers from administration officials, yet another casualty of the War on Terror?
The prototype vehicle cost between $500,000 and $1 million, Fuller said, although she said it is tough to estimate precisely because it involved partnerships with several firms.
The military said it has no plans to produce the truck any time soon, although Bran Ferren, a designer of SmarTruck II, said that if an order came through it could be put in production in a year.
As I read it, after Sept. 11 some military command folks said--wow, that changes a lot.
They concluded the military might need some new ideas for lightweight vehicles and told some researches to play around with what they could come up with.
This isn't going to the battlefield--it's a prototype of a number of new ideas. And if one of those ideas can save an American soldiers life it's well worth it in U.S. Military (as well as Political) economics.
Soldiers are expensive to train (and thus lose) and its even more expensive to explain their death to the public.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
From my experience, HMMWVs rock. I've driven over everything with them, including small trees and boulders. Four-wheel independent suspension and eight-feet wide, baby.
They take a licking and keep on ticking. I've never had a problem with them -- oh yeah, but that's also because we take care of them.
It's honestly really too bad that the people you were around weren't doing their jobs. Don't fault the vehicle for the operator's negligence. The HMMWV is an amazing and versatile vehicle.
The Army people now days don't know anything.
I gotta believe this is nothing more than a troll... you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
But I'll save my breath.
Please, do.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Hey, you noticed all the GoldBricking and showmanship. That's what this is really about. It might also go that extra-mile when high-school kids are herded into an auditorium to watch recruitment videos made using it. All the shop-doodz might get wood and talk about making their own war-buggy, and the chess-headz would probably cookup stats for it so they could play with one in an RPG game or try to draw one for a extra-credit in their cad class, and all the welfare kids would probably be hoping for a scholarship so they wouldn't have to join up to get into college and eat.
Of those that enlist with this kind of thing in mind, 99.9% of them won't realize that they'll probably never see one in actual use; maybe in a motorpool, or maybe if they're not passing out in formation at a parade as a general drives past them in one, but that's about it.
If any intelligence gathering unit showed up with something like this, it would be RPG bait. Little kids would be told to roll grenades under it, and could you imagine getting it ready for inspection?! There would be a pissed off captain somewhere yelling,
"Sick Call!! The whole damn platoon!?!"
Field work is much more successful when they just (skunkworks local 151) rework several large delivery trucks, paint them up with the words, "Delivery" or "Plumbing" in the native language of the area, hire the local piraiah who can't get laid and doesn't have any friends and still lives at home playing video games or programming(holy shit, I just described 90% of slashdot!) to drive the damn thing, and spend the day driving around with electronic vacuum cleaners feeding hard-drives and tape recorders. Nobody would say a word, and the job would get done. The biggest retrofit would be to tear off the metallic top over the cargo area and setup an RF neutral one using fiberglass...no biggie, what, all of $2500 to $5000 per vehicle, and maybe all of $200 to the driver for as long as you need them, when you need them.
Crap...I'm probably screwing up posting this, I certainly hope nobody in the "Axis of Evil" is reading slashdot right now...
Cheers
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento