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Future Army Battle Uniforms - Wired, Lethal
ssyladin writes "CNN is running an article about the future US army battle dress, code-named 'Scorpion'. It says that "..soldiers of 2011 will step into wired uniforms that incorporate all the equipment they need. The uniforms will monitor vital signs and plug them into a massive network of satellites, unmanned planes and robotic vehicles the military has planned." There will be sensors to monitor heartrate and blood-pressure, built-in tourniquets, a HUD to connect to GPS info, overhead maps, infrared and starlight cameras, and even the venerable M16 rifles are slated for an overhaul."
This seems to be just your average pork barrel gee whiz military contracting.
suddenly I feel very tired
Definitely too many things to go wrong! GPS and heartbeat maybe, so they know where to collect the bodies?? But relying on all that electronics makes grunts too vulnerable to EMP. There's no substitute for a reliable weapon in the hands of a well trained soldier.
If I was a soldier, with the current state of technology, I wouldn't want any sort of automatic tourniquet built into my clothes. I'd rather bleed and wait for the medic.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
Woefully under equipped tatty soldiers in 3rd world countries with 40 year old weaponary in 2011 ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
It freaks me out a little bit, why should a country that is allready so powerful still invest so heavyly in arms. who needs these arms? what for? There is nobody strong enough to challenge the US and nobody will be in the foreseeable future.
As a non american i feel threatened.
Am i to be 'liberated' next?
I seem to remember seeing this hashed over various times in the past. It sounds great and all, but when you give all this crazy crap to a marine and ask him what he thinks, he says "This is 27 pounds I *don't* need." (Well, he may not say that if his CO is around, but that's what he's thinking.)
Technology is great and all, but until they can pack it all down to a few ounces, I really don't see it taking off. Every soldier knows how much burden something like just an extra pound adds to a pack. It can really make a difference. In the end it seems to always come down to the battery. They can shrink LCD screens, keyboards, earpieces, whatever. But to have a useful lifetime they still need a heavy battery pack and I think that's what's really holding this back.
The military is all about "total information access" or whatever they call it. But in fact, sheer information alone is useless. I was at Quantico a few years ago presenting a research project and during a presentation, the director of this program emphasized that current technology gives them boatloads of data, the rub is in making sense of it and presenting in a useful way -- both to the soldier and to the people at base camp (or whatever.) So just strapping a GPS module, encrypted digital radio, digicam, etc. on a soldier's back isn't neccessarily useful for anyone involved. Somehow you've got to figure out how to make it all useful.
...None of this is going to do much against terrorist attacks.
The army very much thinks that playing video games makes good soldiers -- even way back in the 80s, playing Space Invaders and Asteroids trained a whole generation of F14 pilots how to use a joystick, AWACS & nuke sub operators how to read their screens -- but not the usual grunt with a rifle. But Quake does that now.
What I'm trying to say is, the military is very upfront about how video games and military are pretty damn similar.
That's OK. You still be firing at the Canadians and the British.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I think you're trolling but I'll respond. A bullet is a bullet is a bullet. In 2011, 40 year old weaponry will be an M-16 / M-60 / AK-47 / AK-74. Last time I check those weapons fire projectiles that will kill a human being. I'm pretty sure the same results will happen 8 years from now too.
The point is not to worry about future opponents, the point is to be modular, to quick deploy and to be tactical - all at the same time. Send soldiers to police a public demonstration in NYC, equip them with body armor, gas mask and non-lethal projecticles. Send soldiers to police Baghdad, same equipment as above but include lethal projecticles, GPS with maps and translation software.
Rangers Lead the Way!
I am wondering if having everyone and everything automated and wirelessly networked is a hot idea. A technologically adept adversary could take advantage of this fact and, say, feed false info into the system, or order an air strike, remote acivation of the automatic tourniquit(sp?) system, what have you. Even if they didn't hack the system a captured unit might be just as good.
Having been a Marine for a number of years, I have to call bullshit on this. Unless you are incompetent, *never* cleaned your rifle, or are incapable of grasping the concept of proper lubrication, M16s just work.
In all of the years I qualified on the KD (Known Distance) course, I had only one failure to feed (which can happen to *any* semi-auto firearm), and I never had a 'jam'. Of the others firing the same course with me that did have jams, the overwhelming majority were due to having a 'dry rifle'; ie: no, or improper lubrication. The others did have mechanical failures, but that is to be expected when you consider the age and actual use of those rifles.
To answer to some of the other replies below: M16s are pretty damned accurate as well with the proper load. The Army Marksmanship Unit shoots the M16 now... And they have won some pretty tough matches with those rifles. Even out to 1000 yards. I left the Corps a few years back, but it wouldn't shock me to hear that the USMC Rifle Team switched from the M14 to the M16.
For what its worth, with the exception of boot camp and the first year afterward, I qualified expert every year averaging 230 out of a possible 250 points. (And 286 out of 300 shooting an off the rack M16 on the NRA High Power course during Marine intramural competition.)
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Plus, locallized, controlled EMP is becoming more and more doable every day - the use of all this high-tech computer equipment may be vulnerable to that (though I'm sure the computers on these things are shielded out the wazoo, I still worry)
And speaking of computer control - did you notice the mention of autonomous robotic artillery vehicles? Doesn't that bother anyone? Currently, robots function as spy planes, spy jeeps, bomber planes, and now artillery tanks. This is a bad trend. They seem to be giving the robots all the heavy firepower. Whether the catastrophe is SkyNet or some ham radio guy who knows his crypto, this does not seem to be a good trend.
In fact, power storage is really what is hampering any major advances into the portable, semi-autonomous electronics. Wireless phones, laptops, robotic flies, cybersoldiers, etc. -- we need some sort of a major breaktrhough in power storage until we can produce actual designs as opposed to mockups that you need to plug into the wall socket.
>|<*:=
Lets not put money into the military and watch as we get run over by warring nations.
Having been a soldier for a number of years I can tell you this is all too true. The German MG-42 isn't still in use just for fun but because it's a good, simple and battle field proven design.
I am looking forward to soldiers in wired combat suits jammed by high-power microwave or EMP transmitters, grinding them to a sudden halt.
All this is good for is breastfeeding an industry that lost sales after the end of the cold war.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
An AC wrote:
You, and all those like you, are wrong. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights enshrine free speech and dissent as the right of every US citizen, and the basis of freedom. Without free speech, there can be no free country. And don't give me this "wartime" idiocy. If dissent during wartime was unAmerican, then sign Abraham Lincoln up as unAmerican. He dissented during a war, from the Senate floor.
You might want to do some reading to brush up on what is and isn't "American". I would suggest the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, president John Quincy Adams' speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, and Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus" (Lady Liberty).
I don't know about the other poster, but I will only be happy:
From someone with a better grasp of what America is all about:
John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821