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The Soldier is the Network
Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from InfoWorld says that "in the battle of the future, the helmet becomes a data retrieval device." It describes a scenario where soldiers are equipped with sensors and other networking equipment. "Each person is a network with routing capability to everyone else," says Peter Marcotullio, director of development at SRI International. This technology should be available in five years for the military, which probably means that we'll become networks ourselves ten years from now. Check this column for a summary. Please note that this article is part of a special report called "From the battlefield to the enterprise" which looks at why some key technologies -- deployed on a massive scale in Afghanistan and Iraq -- may hold promise for corporate IT."
I can think of some other technologies that I would have liked to have available at work, some days.
Anybody knows if FCC has some advisories about wireless devices touching your body for long periods of time? A booklet I have (from my wireless router) states that "The FCC with its action in ET Docket 96-8 has adopted safety standard for human exposure to RF energy emitted: 1) Do not touch or move antennas while unit is transmitting or receiving."
...each platoon has a cracker or a few, who is able to jam the opponent's displays temporarily, hack into older models to confuse the enemy's friend-or-foe identification, protect his own people from such attacks, snoop on enemy data transfers, fry their heads or change the intelligent helmet into guided missile attractor beacon...
Future? Maybe not, but certainly a good idea for a computer game.
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And just how long before someone creates a smart bullet to home in on the EM emissions of this helmet -- and at a whole lot lower cost than the helmet itself?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What is being proposed has been tried before.
The Royal Navy led the world in the mid-19th century in adopting steam propulsion, with ships proceeding in formation at constant speed, with evolutions being carried out as per flag signals from the flagship. Signal books became more complicated; signalling became a job for the brightest and best, among both officers and seamen. New signalling mechanisms such as Morse code over wireless, or Morse over signal lamp, were adopted with alacrity. People sent signals because they could, and having sent signals to the commander, whose orders they were supposed to follow, they expected replies.
Consequently, after a couple of decades of this, the Royal Navy couldn't fight worth shit.
There are two anecdotes involving Nelson and signalling -- the "blind eye" at Copenhagen, and the "England expects" before Trafalgar. These weren't tactical signals. These were Nelson having a laugh. Nelson had no truck with centralised command and this signalling malarkey; he trained his commanders as he was trained, to understand their job and to get on with it as they saw fit. Nelson and his like put the fear of God (or rather, the fear of the Royal Navy) so thoroughly that it lasted a century.
This "the soldier is the network" business means that a soldier is going to get flooded with urgent requests for tax records at a moment when he might expect to be being given information about at which window to point his grenade launcher. But then, that information would probably be coming from a major in a bunker in the Pentagon who's never handled a grenade launcher, and whose orders are going to be at best meaningless and at worst horribly counterproductive.
Maybe the DoD should consult at the militaries of other nations, that have efficient armed forces and smaller budgets, and see what'd spend the money on, given the choice. Wouldn't be this. But it might be a smaller, lighter, more reliable, more powerful, strongly-encrypted radio comms system with extensions for a whiteboard mode.