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More on Next-Generation Army Gear
An anonymous reader writes "The Army is funding development of new super suits. From the article: 'The Army's future soldier will resemble something out of a science fiction movie'. 'The new system has the ability for each soldier to be tied into tactical local and wide-area networks with an onboard computer that sits at the base of the soldier's back' and 'The helmet has sensors that register vibrations of the cranial cavity so [soldiers] don't have to have a microphone'. The article features several photos of the suits."
"Rico's Roughnecks, hooaahhh!"
From the Article:
The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."
I suspect that they may be calling on Berkeley for their Bleex project on this one. The Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton exists now, and I'd imagine with 10 or 15 years to work on it they could easily meet the 300% lifting and load carrying requirements. Of course the Japanese have envisioned soldiers as walking gun platforms for years. I wonder how long it'll be before we see Mecha Warriors in real life...
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Too bad the designers watched the movie instead of reading the book!
Great.. now we can look-forward to our individual soldiers suits being hacked and controled by the enemy.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Who are we going to be fighting with this stuff? Terrorists? Belgium?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Man, they look just like normal suits with some extra crap on the front.
I was hoping for some anime utility suit or Gundam mech you climb inside of or something.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
When wars are fought from 15 miles up now anyway?
Remember when the Army made the big announcement about everyone wearing black berets? That took damn near 18 months to implement and no batteries were required. If this happens anytime during our generation I will be stunned. What they really need are a better pair of standard issue boots...that would be money well spent for the soldiers.
It's worth RTFA, because of some absolutely choice quotes:
"the 2020 model will remind you of an ominous creature out of a science fiction movie"
I love the use of "ominous"
"When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds,"
Wouldn't that get kind of heavy?
"We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."
Now THAT sounds like fun...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The Army's future soldier will resemble something out of a science fiction movie.
And here is my thinking they would look like something out of a period drama.
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Does it run Linux?
Given the amount of electronics and sensors the soldier is wearing, would the army also incorporate "feedback units" like adrenaline injectors and tranquilizers or would it be too prone to hacking?
A counter measure to this would be 'sniffers' looking for these signals. Program guided warheads/projectiles and you could have a relatively easy kill.
Wonder if these suits will come with an excessive moisture sensor? ("I think Johnson has just entered combat - or is incontinent").
Look at the solider in the black. Make it white and we're pretty damn close to having our boys overseas looking like Storm Troopers. All that remains is for Bush to claim himself Emporer, and Chaney to learn the secrets of the Dark Side and become horribly disfigured in some sort of Volcano-related accident.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Judging by the screenshots, they are using Windows.
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
...that with the billions of dollars invested in this project that they would have chosen a manakin that still had it's nose intact.
From the article: "A medic, who can be miles away, will now be able to diagnose and treat a soldier who is about to have sunstroke, without even physically seeing the soldier.
Radio traffic: "Alpha Bravo Charlie appears to be out of action! Doctor, can you give us a report on his telemetry?
Doctor: "Is he wearing that black, 50 pound Darth Vader suit?"
Radio traffic: "Yes!"
Doctor: "It's probably sun stroke."
"To the everlasting glory of the infantry
shines the name
shines the name
of Rodger Young!"
From the hi-res looks of things, the year 2020 soldier (on the left in black) is gonna promote friendly fire casualties with his mask all fogged up.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
If the soldiers on the ground are going to be so completely dependent on electrical equipment? These things don't have to be a giant explosion any more, either. I believe there has been progress in directional, possibly portable, EM-disabling weapons. I know. Let's put all the soldiers in faraday cages! Mosquito netting for the 22nd century!
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
The Army has is all wrong. Instead of spending money and the U.S. soldier, they should just outsource the soldiers and have other nations fight for us. It works for corporations, why not the Army...
Somebody put me out of my misery.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
It should be noted that those 2000 pound bombs dropped in residential areas are normally 2000 pounds of concrete. It's all kinetic energy, not explosive ordinance, designed to keep collateral damage down. Your IEDs, on the other hand, are designed to inflict as much collateral damage as possible, which is why Americans gawk in horror at them.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
"...an onboard computer that sits at the base of the soldier's back"
People into concealed-carry handguns have been warning each other about carrying anything hard against the small of your back for quite a while. The thought is that a backwards fall could damage your spine quite nicely.
Terrorists will concentrate on building EMP bombs.
Technoli
They say the Soilder of the futures gear will weigh only 50 pounds.
Since WWI the full combat gear has always weighed 120 pounds.
It will just allow you to carry more ammo into the combat zone. TaDa! 120 pounds again.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
That is practically right out of Larry Niven's Ringworld series. The characters wore armor that stiffened when impacted. Very cool anyways. "What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."
stealth velcro.
Yes, thats right. Back in the late 80s or early 90s the US military wanted to use velcro for pockets and whatnot on military uniforms. Unfortunately, none of the higher ups had ever used velcro, nor knew that velcro made a swwwissh ripping noise when opened, so when they arrived, the soldiers thought they might get shot if they opened their pocket for a condom or something. So they spent many more millions of dollars to invent stealth velcro.
Today they use snaps and zippers.
It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous ... In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact. (George Orwell, 1984)
If you've got a robotic exoskeleton and a wide area network, why not just pilot the soldier remotely?
Seems to make a lot more sense than still sending a real person in... plus the army would have no trouble getting recruits to play counterstrike.
The infantry already carries a huge amount of weight with them at this point. All of this stuff is really cool from a tech standpoint, but the last thing a soldier really needs is more wieght.
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NSFWThink of it this way... The armed forces are looking for more recruits so what better way to attract that target group of males age 18 to 25 (other than reinstituting the draft) than to promise soldiers really high-tech toys... c'mon who doesn't want a magic suit that not only has a computer (with a HUD!) built in to it, but also has that crazy super-strength nanotech armor!
I like the fine staff these firms bring to the operation - like Apartheid-era South Africans with warrants in their own country for crimes against humanity.
I love this quote (emphasis mine):
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010."
Invincible eh? That's some pretty neat gear... does it include a quick dipping in the River Styx?
I'd be curious to know how they're going to maintain the WAN without it being a radio beacon for the enemy to spot. Frequency hopping would help a little, but I'm sure a creative engineer could work around that.
It's like a portable target beacon for missiles!
We did this in Afghanistan.
We outsourced the fight with Russia to Al Queda.
Look what that got us.
Politicians, bullshit artists, college kids, and people who don't have to wear/live with the bullshit can't possibly appreciate just how stupid the "future warrior" plan is.
This whole "future" warrior schtick will complicate soldier's life (hauling 150lbs of crap everywhere you go, being accountable for it and its condition, and having to haul your wounded buddies ass out of 'the shit'), which is hard enough as it is. The Pentagon needs to leave the toys in the locker and make better decisions. The things I always thought about when I was 'humpin' around with my lpc's and m16 with alice on my back were something like this...
Light, effective weapons (caseless ammo, call-home capability, lightweight/composite tech, and imprinting to the soldier are do-able)
Miniturized/ruggedized commo which works with implanted chips (if you're a soldier, your ass is 0wn3d anyway) which give biotelemetry without bullshit readouts. Only the medic/commanders need to see what condition a soldier is in. They could even aggregate the data.
Limb-replacement tech...yes, regrow your amputated bits. Rehabilitiation tech needs to pull its sorry butt into the new century.
Immune system amping (be able to eat/drink just about anything), better treatments for bacterial infections and 'derm' tech which would give the soldier a patch that would help sustain their opitate/endorphin/adrenaline balances...combat the stress of combat. When people aren't going apeshit in-ranks casualties are significantly reduced (yes, a chemical-control cocktail). Got a buddy who has crapped himself after that last RPG took out the track behind yours? Just step on his neck and slap one of these patches on his ass and don't worry about him hosing everyone in a panic.
Good food.
The ability to eat anything would be helpful too.
Oh, and having the soldiers adapt to and understand the culture they're going to be fighting with/in. There's more than one way to win a war.
Yeah, as usual, compared to what would really make a difference (don't even go towards the "not fight in the first place" argument--humanity sucks) a bunch of neato armor bits and some computer stuff is really a very easy way out.
Cheers.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
I remember at one point the military was looking for a full robotic exoskeleton that went above and below the waist. I believe that they gave up and decided to persue lower-body-only technology because they were running into problems with the exoskeleton ripping the tendons and ligaments of those who wore the suit prototypes. The human stretch reflex is a function of the central nervous system and is designed to prevent limbs from being placed into positions that stress the connective tissues. Obviously, with a powered exoskeleton one wrong move could result in an arm getting pulled much further than your nervous system would ever let you position it under your own power. I believe that the researchers got tired of wrestling with this problem and decided to focus on the lower body because human joints in the lower body tend to be of simplier design (and easier to replicate and control) than the upper body ones. Ultimately they'd like to have powered legs that are capable of complex motion like running so that troops could cover large distances in a single day. But running is complex enough even without a suit. I imagine it's going to be a long time before you can put on a set of techno-trowsers and not rip your hamstrings right off your bone!
GMD
watch this
Look up "spread spectrum".
--- Ban humanity.
As a non-American (but citizen of a supposed ally), the U.S. military's superiority makes me a little nervous when coupled with their "might-makes-right" attitude. For example, there's a popular new American song whose lyrics include, "we'll put a boot up your ass, it's the American way." Is this really the foundation of American values? Is this the mentality that the rest of the world can look forward to from the current economic and military leader of the world?
It's sad to me that growing up, I always regarded the U.S. as one of the good guys, but now I've realized that once they realized there was nobody who could stand up militarily, they are just as willing to coerce other nations with the threat of force as any other major power in history.
Let me give an example of current American attitudes toward right and wrong. When the news about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses came around, someone in the U.S. government (can't remember the name) publicly defended the actions saying that it wasn't as bad as what was happening there under Saddam. To that, I raise the question, "Do you want to be the good guys, or not?" My grade seven teacher told me to always compare yourself to the best, never to the worst, or else you'll eventually be no better than the worst.
Anyway, sorry this got a bit off topic, but I think it shares a major concern. I completely agree with the need for a nation to have adequate military strength to deter aggression, but is it inevitable that a nation that possesses such strength will invariably let that power overcome their sense of right and wrong?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Money would be better spent teaching the solders the local langauge, customs and religion. Have you seen those videos of US solders busting into Iraq homes and yelling in English?! Gee I wonder why they hate us. If they are wearing silly hi-tech suits they'll be even more alien.
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Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
Dead is dead. The problem is that Americans only give a shit when it is an American who got whacked. Who do you think suffered more civilian casualties in the latest gulf war, the US or Iraq? And military casualties? And the horror is that IED's are designed for maximum collateral damage? How about cluster bombs (as far away from surgical as you can get)? Depleted Uranium (will be killing for the next 300,000 years)? 30mm auto cannon (round 1 is on target, the next 30 are all over the place)? Half retarded 19 year old hicks from backwater USA (you wouldn't trust this idiot to make you a burger, but you give him a rifle, and a get out of jail free card)? Each of those produces exponentially more collateral damage than an IED, but most Americans could not care less. "Oh poor Timmy Bob Smith, got his hand blown off on patrol, that is horrible, those savages. I heard Timmy killed a whole Iraqi family at a wedding the day before, stupid sand niggers, should know better than to celebrate when the cav comes to town"
Oh, and MOST 2000lb bombs were filled with concrete? Right, of course they were. I mean, why not pay to fly a loadout of practice munitions into the fight. I think its more likely that just enough were dropped so the commanders could say "were trying". The vast majority were standard 2000lb "hot" drops.
I did a little more research and I can't find a reference to dropping concrete more recent that 1999, in reference to the No-Fly Zones (AKA the Protection Zone For Al-Qaeda Terrorists In Northern Iraq).
Anyway, not saying that we are or are not dropping concrete these days, but I would be a little surprised if we prefaced the invasion and occupation with anything less than the most lethal air power. If you know otherwise, though, by all means school me.
I don't see how you can say roadside IEDs are designed to inflict as much collateral damage as possible. Haji calls the cell phone when the hummer goes by. It's a military target. Car bombs, on the other hand, are the preferred weapon of the terrorist.
Note that "best intel apparatus currently available" is not nearly the same thing as "best intel apparatus currently possible", "best intel apparatus currently affordable", or "best intel apparatus currently cost-effective".
Nor does your objection take into account factors like political will and competence.
9/11 didn't happen because it just wasn't possible to get the necessary intel. 9/11 happened because of 20+ years of just not caring enough to look into it.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Actually the trend in small arms for the past 50 years has been steadily downward -- shorter range and less powerful rounds. There are two interrelated reasons for this.
First, outside of the sniper role, a high-power round like .30-06 (or even 7.62 NATO) is overkill; in most situations an infantryman isn't going to be doing aimed fire past 200 - 300 meters, so small arms that are effective out to 600 - 1000 meters just aren't needed. Current doctrine says that anything more than 200 meters away is engaged with heavy weapons (heavy machine gun, rocket launcher, artillery, air strike, etc). If you have soldiers with exoskeletons, this will let you take your heavy weapons off of the HMMV and have them hand-carried by your exos instead. Other than that, tactical doctrine doesn't change much if at all.
Second, if each round is smaller and weighs less, the soldier can either carry more ammo for his weapon or can carry parts & ammo for a squad-level heavy weapon. Having exos doesn't change this -- you're still going to want to keep pretty much the same distribution of weapons in a squad as you have now. The only difference will be that your troops will be able to carry a lot more equipment -- more ammo for their personal weapon and the squad weapon, more food & water, heavier armor, etc.
It's important to remember that infantry combat is a team sport. Each soldier's gear is tailored to maximize the entier team's effectiveness, not necessarily his individual effectiveness. This means that the gear which is appropriate for a member of an infantry squad in a combined arms unit isn't necessarily going to be ideal for individual survival or for use by irregular forces (partisans/militia).
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Your suit's Clock may be incorrect. Blink once to install Gator Suit Commander or Blink twice to trust our software.
Imagine yourself in the battlefield and suddenly a red blinking popup in your eye. Is it an enemy alert, battery low maby? No, your one of the 500 lucky people, Blink once to receive....wtf?
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
Just curious when this technology is going to spill into sports like football or hockey.
Should make for an interesting game with less injury.
(Although, maybe more injury because the players can be rougher.)
The communication part would have some obvious advantages though.
It's "easy" to kill a tank. 10 inches of armour and a 20kg shoulder fired missile can still kill it.
You can power an exoskeleton suit with batteries, fuel cell, gas turbine, whatever but all that energy you are using ends up as heat anyway, wearing it you are going to be lit up like a christmas tree in the infrared. The number of machine gun rounds it can absorb will be near irrelevant because the opposition are going to be raining anti-tank armaments down on you.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Right, we've created our own asymmetric threat.
Consider that the cost of the 9/11 operation was about a half a million dollars over five years. In response, we've spent about 150 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan in just two years.
We are outspending the enemy 300,000 to 1. This takes pyrrhic victory to a whole new level!
There are several Funny-modded posts pointing out that the 2020 suit looks like a Darth Vader costume. Hell, even the mil spokesman describes it as "ominous". Nobody seems to see this as a drawback. The damn things look evil.
A lot of planning nowadays assumes that the most likely conflict scenarios involving US forces are so-called "fourth-generation wars", where cultural perceptions and media strategy are as important as hardware. The intifada is still the textbook example. Those kids weren't throwing stones because they didn't have access to guns. They were throwing stones because stones against tanks makes a great video-bite for the media.
So: on the "imperial" side we have legions of anonymous mooks in hulking black armour and face-concealing visors. Backed up by horrifying robotic killing machines. On the "rebel" side we have rag-tag, lightly-armed folk in nice earth-hued organic-looking clothing. Got that? Now put it on a TV screen. Regardless of your political views on a given conflict, there is a huge amount of cultural programming that leads Western viewers to root for the rebels. (Non-Western viewers generally don't need much convincing.)
Another, more worrying aspect: there is a lot of experimental and real-world evidence to show that the willingness of troops, police etc to commit atrocities is strongly correlated with their anonymity. Visors and even sunglasses increase the likelihood; big bold nametags reduce it. Anything that makes eye-contact difficult also makes it harder to win the trust of any locals you have to deal with.
And haven't these people even read the Evil Overlord List? It's item #1 for crying out loud!
In the semi-near future, one could maybe see a (few) experimental teams of special forces wearing advanced getups like this, but I suspect the common solider is going to be wearing about the same stuff he has been (more or less) for nearly half a century now.
Maybe someone more in the know could comment, but from snippets I've gathered, current soliders aren't even outfitted with any sort of bullet-proof body armor -- you get a flak jacket, but that has no chance of stopping bullets. I've stumbled upon stories of familes pooling their resources to buy more elaborate body armor... seems rather far fetched to think that if the US doesn't currently outfit soliders with bulletproof armor of whatever type that in the near term any appreciable number are going to be wearing incredible advanced (and even more expensive) super-solider get-up.
The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier.
;-)
Psssst! Wanna see my gun?
This just really does beg to be joked about. And as for the nano-technology; I see lots of problems. For instance - how does the nanobots know the difference between the person and the clothing? Will they accidentally convert the person's skin from one thing to another? Think about it - one of the reasons crimes get solved is because all things leave traces of themselves on other things - like bodies. So the clothing you are wearing is actually leaving small amounts of itself on you as you wear them. If the nanobots are keyed to convert all of X into Y won't they then, just maybe, convert skin into....what? Or even if they just collect around the point of impact to solidify the cloth-like substance into an Ironman outfit - won't the speed of the bullet mean that by the time the nanobots converted the cloth that the bullet would have already partially penetrated the person's body? I mean, after all, they may be fast, but a bullet is travelling at an extremely high rate of speed. Thus, for every 1/10 or 1/100th of a second they attempt to converge on and stop the bullet - the bullet will have traveled some distance. And that distance is not a millimeter but maybe as much as a centimeter or decimeter. So suddenly the nanobots are attempting to stop the bullet after it has penetrated the skin. Wouldn't that mean that they might just enter the blood stream? If they are keyed to react to heat they might suddenly decide that the blood stream needs to be stopped.
So in reality, the nanobots would have to recognize that something was moving towards the target at a high rate of speed which, when the calculations are done, would show that the item would hit the target. Then the nanobots would all have to be told to go to the potential impact area so they could build up against the impact (or convert the cloth in that area to whatever material is going to be used to resist the impact). This doesn't account for exposed areas such as the head, hands, or other areas exposed by the nanobots rushing to one particular area (and possibly leave something hanging out for everyone else to see).
Last, but not least is the fact that multiple shots being fired from multiple locations at the same target could also confuse the nanobots leaving the person to look like a zebra or maybe a cheetah as the nanobots try to protect the person within the suit.
My money would be on a more classical outfit with a PDA for a brain, greater memory so it can handle the increased needs, some kind of multitasking OS so it can handle all of the requirements, and a networking/cellphone interface so it can handle that as well. Probably less than ten pounds altogether. If they used current laser technologies on transmitting data they'd just need one fiber to do all of the i/o and visuals. PDAs are already used to do sensing in classrooms, to do fingerprinting, and will very soon probably be able to run another display.
As for power - I see fuel cells as the way of the future with PDAs. Today's bulky fuel cells are going to be replaced by slimmer, lighter fuel cells. Thus, the PDA suit could be powered for an entire day if necessary via a fuel cell which conforms to the soldier's body.
Other methods to generate electricity for the suit could include light weight, piston based, energy generators. These generators are situated on the outside of the arms and legs. They are not heavy, bulky metallic rods but are instead smaller light weight polycarbon rods. The rods are hollow and have wires running back up to the helmet/neck region. (Or down to the lower back.) As the rods are pulled
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
I know that armies always prepare for the last war, but this is getting faintly ridiculous.
Large quantities of heavy metal doesn't always achieve the objective. And the US has a consitent record of losing the lot by calling in an airstrike when a cup of tea would have done a better job. This is just more of the same.
If you have a look at what nations with a successful peacekeeping and low intensity warfare record (eg. Finland, the UK and Australia) do, they make sure that they don't look like robocop. They take their helmets off, so that they are regarded as human beings. They're polite (well, politeish). They don't rely on sensor systems; they talk to people.
All the technology in the world won't overcome cluelessness and myopia.