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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."
Friendly fire maybe, civilans no... I doubt that "Enemy combatants" are going to willingly do ANYTHING which would make the easily noticeable to a compter, infact this sort of thing is more likely to make them fight in civilian clothes...
And did anyone else notice the picutre looked like somthing out of tiberian sun?
I read recently that the Army did a study which concluded that the maximum weight that soldier should be sent into combat carrying was (I think) 40 lbs. Of course, this figure is already routine exceeded. But without claiming any expertise in this area, I too have real doubts about whether the value the average soldier will get from this hardware justifies the weight. Plus, if soldiers are constantly transmitting their locations and heartbeat rate, etc., then doesn't this open up the possibility that their locations can be plotted by RDF?
This post is dedicated to all of those
go Drone. you know you want to.The only thing stopping you is hundreds of thousands of war-mongers.
There are no WMD. You lied. Shame on you Dubya.
But still, they all died. Except for Ripley of course ;-)
I've been seeing a _lot_ of articles and "special features" lately about The Weapon and The Soldier of The Future. I can't help but be reminded of the pro-army propaganda in Starship Troopers (the antiwar movie, not the conservative novel). The Future Soldier that CNN is featuring somehow reminds me of a wimped-down version of Heinlein's powered armor suits.
There have been many instances of media covering the weapons of the future (I submitted a story on future robots a couple of weeks ago); what I'm worried about is why that focus is there. Are we getting ready for a long series of wars, ones that we expect to last until at least 2011, when these super-wired Counterstrike uniforms will come into service? That's kind of scary.
(sorry for the blatant US-centrism)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
As mentioned in "Encounter at Farpoint". If the uniforms can monitor health and apply tourniqets, it is only a small step to being able to administer pain relief medication and then go even further and supply a surge of adrenalin immediately prior to battle, followed by a sedative once fighting has ceased.
What's your rank and unit soldier?
Corporal, 1055 Berserker Division Sir.
============
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
I can't see how using an arcade joystick with big blastic ball on the top would be helpful in any way in the operation of the joystick of the F-14's HOTAS. Moving an arcade joystick teaches as much about a flying an aircraft with its joystick about as much as moving the stick shift in your car. It'll teach you how change direction, but not what the castle button on the top of the F-14's stick does when pushed in the N direction, or even the fact that pushing the stick forward makes the aircraft pitch down and side motion controls roll.
As for the connection between AWACS and sonar operators learning how to read their screen by arcade games, I'd say that you're vastly underestimating the complexity of said military applications. Since when do arcade games use the same symbology, labeling conventions and settings as radars? How could staring at a bunch of pixelated space ships help in reading a waterfall display on a sub?
The Quake thing is kind of true- a modified version of Doom was used for reaction training, and now a system based off Operation Flashpoint is in development. Based off of it, but still heavily modified.
Might I ask whether you have any references for your other claims?
The only games I've found to be similar to military activities are the ones that actually try to portray it realistically. Even with those there are significant sacrifices made for gameplay or development reasons.
America's Army home page.
Rangers Lead the Way!
The last (almost) global empire, the Roman one, did think the same thing. They thought their legions were unbeatable by anyone in the world, so they just didn't care about improving it, and the number of logionaires was at an all time law by the end of the 5th century. They were still the greatest army in the known world, and unbeatable by any other army.
Then in the winter of around 495 the legions of the Rhine and Danube fronteers just saw something strange. Hundreds of thousands of people were camping in the borders of the rivers. But not Soldiers. Not young and strong man. But Old men and women and children...
As soon as the rivers got frozen by the lower winter temperatures, they just crossed it. Thousands of people, unarmed, weak, starving. And the legions could do nothing, even with better equipment and better training and all the money Rome spent with them. There were simply not enough of them to stop thousands of "civilians" to invade the empire.
I guess the US are just not willing to incur in the same mistakes as the romans did.
and, wouldn't it be neet if you hack in to the network, enable you to see all unit movement and location. I see a terrible security issue here.
Not to mention that the OICW costs $35,000 (on top of being more fragile). The only thing the weapon adds is a laser range finder which is nearly useless when you consider the trajectory of 5.56mm rounds. Depending on the grain of the cartridge the round is dead on at 200 meters and only drops a couple inches at 300 meters. I just can't see the need for all that electronics crap just so you don't need to aim 4 inches higher. Not to mention that you now have to laze to the target before you fire on it and you can easily get a bad range if there are shrubs in the path of the laser. I can see the need for a laser range finder on a tank but not when you are engaging targets that are only 350 meters away. Want accuracy? Rechaimber an M16A2 for 7.62, reduce the 40mm size of the M203 grenade launcher so it can be fired at a greater velocity, and fit the weapon with a M4 carbine style tactical scope instead of the M16A2 style open sight.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Which is exactly the problem: the M16 wasn't designed to be used in battlefield conditions. A little sand here, or lack of lube there, and you've got a glorified bayonet. The M16 is a classic example of textbook engineering - it is a very well designed, very accurate rifle. But unlike the soviet and chinese counterparts, it has no tolerance for dirt; without proper lubrication, it jams. Compound this with the fact that the Army doesn't issue field cleaning kits, and that CLP (lube) is distributed at the platoon level (if at all), and you've got a recipe for battlefield failure. Granted, the AK47 and Kalishnikov rifles aren't accurate past 400 meters, but the average soldier couldn't hit anything beyond 150 meters with any appreciable accuracy anyway. Contrary to popular belief, firefights don't consist of a bunch of soldiers picking off the enemy from 1000 meters. In short, having a reliable, albeit inaccurate weapon is much more useful than having an accurate weapon that jams at the wrong time.
You are way overstating the case. Yes, the original marks of the M16 in the Vietnam era had a lot of problems, but those were worked out in the A1 and especially A2 versions of the rifle. You need to clean and lubricate your weapon but this is true of all weapons. The current M16 is no different than most other modern battle rifles in reliability. A military that doesn't train its troops to maintain their equipment is a poor military and probably has other problems beyond dirty weapons.
I don't know what platoons you were in, but in the units I was in, every soldier got a little bottle of CLP, and as much of that and patches as he could ask for. Soldiers who use magazines as hammers need to be corrected of that habit, maybe some extra duty or a statement of charges will do the trick. Never use a tool for something other than what it was intended to do.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
...wrote a fitting line for this in Starship troopers, something along the lines of, "Bog a cap trooper down with all kinds of fancy gadgets and someone a lot more simply equipped, say with a stone axe, will sneak up behind him and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier."
"A technologically adept adversary could take advantage of this fact and, say, feed false info into the system..."
Taking the opposite strategy let Australia defeat the US in wargames a few years ago.
Australia took the part of defenders of a large (anonymous) desert country, and the US the attackers from the sea. US plans included a lot of electronic surveillance. The Aussies passed commands using runners and pieces of paper, sent fake messages to each other implying that the most heavily defended area of beach was completely empty, and foiled the US landing.
The script said this wouldn't happen, so the referees allowed the game to continue as if the landing was successful.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Actually, the "war on drugs" is the most successful snowjob ever pulled on the american people. In limited situations cocaine is STILL used for pharmaceutical purposes, and there are a zillion opiates in the mix as well, yet the feds outlaw even STUDIES involving MDMA. Or put another way, alcohol and cigarettes are legal, and kill thousands every year, yet marijuana is illegal. Even if you think that marijuana makes one more likely to, say, get in a car accident, you must agree that it is less likely to do so than alcohol. Add to that the fact that you can die of alcohol poisoning and it makes the whole war on drugs thing pretty retarded.
In addition, making drugs illegal has only increased their street value, which increases the motivation to grow, process, distribute, and/or sell drugs to end users. The solution, of course, is to make marijuana legal and tax the shit out of it as they do cigarettes (you pay more taxes on cigs than you pay for the product itself now, not that I'm complaining, this is what the people want) and spend the money on education like we should have been doing all along.
However, the US has what is called the "poverty industry", the legions of people who make money off maintaining the status quo in this country. (We are not unique in this respect, mind you.) In order for it to work you must keep the poor poor and in trouble. Putting people in prisons and maintaining the welfare system employs thousands at all levels of government and funnels billions of dollars of tax revenues into systems in which it can be siphoned off and end up in various pockets where it does not belong. The war on drugs is only a symptom, but it is a problematic one which is inflaming all others and as such it should be treated before we go looking for the cure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I was a grad student, I did some work for an Army project on building some of the biosensors that would be included in future uniforms. The organization I did the research for was working on biosensors to measure heartbeat (I did some work on the microcode) and was attempting to build a hypothermia/shiver detector (that I was doing most of my work on).
:)
We were experimenting with placing small devices that measure acceleration in various places and attempting to determine from a frequency-time analysis (i.e. imagine a frequency spectrum vs time) using neural networks and wavelet analysis to try and differentiate between the acceleration profiles caused by walking, running, moving, etc vs shivering....
The alternative was to stick a small thermometer up the soldier's "rear" which I don't think anyone wanted
Evolution: love it or leave it