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U.S. Soldiers Hate New High-Tech Gear
mattnyc99 writes "Land Warrior, the Army's wireless equipment package featuring helmet cams, GPS, laser range-finders and a host of other state-of-the-art electronics, is finally ready for deployment on a global battlefield network in Iraq after 15 years of R&D at the Pentagon. But in a report for Popular Mechanics, Noah Shachtman not only tries on the new digital armor—he talks to troops who don't like it at all. As if that wasn't disheartening enough for the future of tech at war, the real Land Warrior system doesn't even match up to its copycat gear in Ghost Recon 2."
But does it run Linux?
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
This sounds just like the story of the M16 vs. the AK47. The M16 is a much better gun, designed to be much more sophisitcated. But in the end, it ends up being worse because tight tolerances cause it to jam up, and require cleaning all the time, where-as the AK47 will fire under just about any conditions. The AK47 is also heavier which is really nice when you get into hand-to-hand combat and you can just whack the other guy with it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
the real Land Warrior system doesn't even match up to its copycat gear in Ghost Recon 2
Well, duh. Otherwise I'd start bitching that my crossbow isn't as accurate at 500 yards as its Half-Life copycat.
Bitching about newly issued equipment is army tradition.
And what the hell does Ghost Recon 2 have to do with anything?
Real life isnt the same as a video game? Then why did I feel so huge after I ate those mushrooms?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Pissing and moaning. This isn't even remotely surprising. I don't believe Land Warrior is the holy grail of high tech combat in the digital age, but I believe it will prove itself a great asset when troops know how to use it, and use it well.
Maybe for a soldier doing routine guard duty this may look cool, but in front-line fighting all that extra bulk could kill you.
When fighting in a small area it's important to have your wits about you, and I can't see how distracting the soldier with extra equipment that is useless in close-quarters combat can be seen as a good idea.
In short, this is good if you're protected enough to be able to devote the concentration to using the system. But don't slow our troops down with something they most likley won't use when they perportedly need it most.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of _the_AK-47_and_M16.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There are MANY technophiles in the Army, it's just that they have the odd expectation that technology they use should be simple, robust, effective, and not burdensome to the user.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Don't tell Richard "Mack" Machowicz of The Discovery Channel's Future Weapons. He'd be out of a job.
So, what happens when
the smart other side captures
one of our soldiers?
And what's worse is the Land Warrior system uses the system BF 2142 added to deliver in-battle ads even during firefights! No wonder the grunts hate it.
Years ago when I first heard of all these electronic technical wiz-bang features for soldiers I tried to picture myself playing with computers while trying to kill people or keep myself from being killed. A good taxi driver does not need a GPS map to know where to go and what streets to take. Good soldiers damn well know exactly where their friends and objectives are in their heads..not on a mcdonalds menu.
What I would really care about are remote control weapons that allow me to blow things up without sticking my head out, robotic mine sweepers...etc.
I want that eye monitor thingie so I can pretend to be borg. Please?
20. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.
...
35. The more a weapon costs, the farther you will have to send it away to be repaired.
...
37. Interchangeable parts aren't.
...
43. The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.
My own: Any unneeded component of a weapon will be quickly removed and thrown in the nearest ditch.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
As my old man (US Army retired) would say about any new military infantry technology more complex than a rock, "Give it to the average grunt and he'll find some way to break it."
Wish the huge US military budget was spent in less aggressive roles. Seems always a shoot and kill policy. Never a sit down and talk about it first. Hell wish I was in the US cos I would like to shoot my neighbor for trespass a year ago, there gain were best buddies now. There again its monaey that makes the world go around..
High tech would be a robot overlord wrecking havoc against are enemies for us.. that is, unless we're the enemies.. then we'd pretty much think it was the suck.
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
It would seem to me that flying a modern fighter jet is not "as easy" as flying a biplane, uh, back in the day. After all, there are a ton of electronic devices in the jet that allow you to do some pretty amazing things with it, but yes, it does require more knowledge and education and concentration, perhaps.
Any redneck in the backwoods of Tennessee can like, fix a tractor and run it in any conditions. He's really "smart" that way... or perhaps, "handy." But put him in front of a commercial jet... as technically minded as he is (he may even be able to partially understand how the actual machinery works), he probably will have a hard time actually flying it if he's required to use these new fangled electronic devices. It'll probably be overwhelming and he'll probably wish he had his tractor back again.
I really have no idea exactly why they don't like it, but this doesn't seem to be terribly new. People have always tended to resist things that are new; sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't... in this case, since this technology most likely will put the troops in less physical danger because of technological advances that keep their physical body out of harms way (e.g., peering over a wall with the gun instead of your head)... I think that's a good thing.
Why drive a jeep into the "front lines" (not that we exactly have "front lines" anymore...) when you can drive a heavily armored tank that travels twice as fast and has a better turning radius, more stability, and more firepower...
Reminds me of Batman Begins quote about the high tech body armor... you know the one.
I sit here racking my brain for why the soldiers are wrong. I think to myself, "hmm, they just aren't used to it. they need to get us3ed to the new equipment."
But then I read that the tracking capabilities can lag up to a minute behind: I certainly couldn't play a first person shooter with a 60,000ms ping - how could this be any less of a problem in real life?
Despite my vehement tecnophillia, I too wonder if this gear is really a benefit.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
I think this is actually hugely encouraging:
We're finally getting a concrete reality check about the usefulness of such systems. This might, might be something that moves DoD people towards worrying about effectiveness first and foremost, rather than wanting to be Q from the James Bond books.
Let's be honest - does the world really need a more effective U.S. military right now? To the extend that the DoD is wasting money to its own detriment, perhaps that will clip the Bush administration's ambitions a little.
In the future, if we actually have a just war to wage, we'll potentially go into it with the knowledge that we don't have to spend 400-bazillion dollars to wage it. Sacrifice our sons and daughters, yes. Make them wear heavy, unhelpful equiment, no. This lets us wage war a little bit longer before the dollar collapses and we have to negotiate a truce.
This article reminds me of two things:
"It is a hard heart that kills!" - Full Metal Jacket
Hiro turns off all the techno-bullshit. The statistics about his impending death distract him... - Snow Crash
What happens to this whole thing when the batteries die? Or when they have to jump in the water and it shorts out? Or when it just, you know, breaks? Soldiering is soldiering, no matter what technologies you equip your soldiers with. It's about being adaptable, flexible, and enduring. This techno crap isn't really any of those things.
Whatever happened to the OICW?
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Awesome, now with all of this high-tech gadgetry, I can't tell how far away something is from me! On a serious note, I'm *guessing* that the monitor thing in front of the main picture's face is foldable, pivotable or something to get it out of the way, but I can see how this equipment could be a huge liability.
So what happens when the insurgents are in a building with a high power antenna and net stumbler and pick up 16 access point SSIDs named "Linksys Soldier"?
It's been a while for me, I was a grunt in Europe, but I have to say I'm not surprised. US soldiers carry way too much crap, and the high tech stuff often breaks. The Germans had a much better sense of what worked: they'd do infantry tactics with their weapon, ammo, a first aid dressing and a protective mask, period. Not even a canteen, often. We did one "all in good fun" exercise with them, lugging all our crap, and the Germans ran circles around us (and "won" the exercise).
I see pictures of US infantry in Iraq with insulated ground pads (about 1/2 inch thick foam). That's for extreme cold weather. WTF? too much crap, too much crap...
on one side, it's ridiculous that the camera focuses so slow.....
on the other, if you can't move virtually as fast with 16 pounds on you as without, you are perpetuating the image of slashdot readers as screaming ass pussies.
Boy, I bet they never thought of that!
It's change. No one likes drastic change. When we turn filing cabinets full of paperwork into databases, people complain, even though it is much faster, and should make their job much easier, they don't like it and complain that it makes everything more complicated. To the point where you make a dumbed down interface for it, they will still complain. After several months of being forced to use it, they start to love it. It just takes a while to get over change.
Although I'm not sure the same will apply with the Land Warrior System. It's more gear to lug around, and it adds more complexity and responsibility to individual soldiers, rather than making things simpler for them. But seeing how it can give them alot more info that will help them survive, I still think it will catch on fairly quickly.
The US army should spend less money on gadgets and more money on training their troops for longer rather than sending barely trained recruits straight into battle zones.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
War, since the first Gulf one, is becoming a big Live Action video game. Us vs. them, real time coverage, lots of gadgets, wireless, unmanned, "intelligent" weapons. That helps a lot to detach people from the reality of the war, canceling the natural effect that would naturally arise, now that it is possible to show the war in all its ugliness, all its gore.
People, including we tech people, should not fall for the siren song that is military technology. It is all advanced, "cool", state of the art but, no matter what is the justification (or rationalization), killing people is never beautiful, and, as opposed to video games, real people have families, sometimes are innocent and never respawn.
Now, when governments begin to create super-cool gadgets that actively save lives, it is something worth. Better body armor, a force shield, not getting involved with foreign countries for fun and profit, etc. And by "actively", I mean something different than saving lives by getting enemies to be identified and "neutralized" before they can act. Because, as most occupations in the past and present centuries shows, sometimes the simpler and less detectable device (be it a grenade bobby trap in the jungle or a roadside bomb on Iraq) can be the deadliest.
The M16 is a much better gun, designed to be much more sophisitcated. But in the end, it ends up being worse because tight tolerances cause it to jam up, and require cleaning all the time, where-as the AK47 will fire under just about any conditions.
There is a world of difference in feel as well. The AK feels much more mechanical, if that makes sense, than the M-16.
Bit of trivia: there is a spring-loaded recoil reducer (yeah, I know, on a 5.56...) in the stock of the M-16: when you are firing with your cheek (facial cheek) against the stock, the noise from the recoil mechanism is almost as loud as the report of the weapon itself.
The AK47 is also heavier which is really nice when you get into hand-to-hand combat and you can just whack the other guy with it.
Boris, is that you?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
And that thing is heavy! Add to that 70 pounds of body armor and you can barely move. And it's slow and distracting. You can't go into a firefight while wearing one easily, and sending messages - one of its most powerful features - is clunky.
That being said, it's still pretty darn cool and I've met several soldiers who love it. It's not perfect and I think it still needs a generation of two before it's really combat ready. But the Striker Brigade that took them to Iraq is generally positive.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
You raise a good point. The enemy could then don the helmet and immediately find out troop positions and other intel. So what are the possible countermeasures to prevent this from happening?
Warface intel is great, but the more widely you make it available, the harder it becomes to contain, pretty much like any other piece of information in society.
1. Shoot US soldier
2. Don his high-tech gear
3. Turn on map locator showing his whole squad
4. Profit!
The AK47 is also heavier which is really nice when you get into hand-to-hand combat and you can just whack the other guy with it.
No, no it's not. Heavier = bad. An infantryman can only carry so much shit around, and we've pretty much hit that maximum right now. Any weight you add in a personal weapon is going to have to be cut somewhere else, or else you're going to affect the speed and mobility (not to mention comfort) of the soldier carrying it around.
You're going to make a trade-off somewhere. If you can make the rifle lighter, speaking as someone who has carried one (along with an additional 75 pounds of crap), make it lighter. If I wanted to beat someone in the head with something, I'd use an entrenching tool, or some other more appropriately club-shaped and -weighted object. They're not exactly in short supply.
And I don't have any statistics, but I'll bet that the number of times that rifles are used as clubs in modern combat is pretty low. I don't think it's really an important design criterion. I think most soldiers would rather have the additional weight in ammunition, rather than just in simple mass that's only useful if the enemy is a few feet away.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Luke, you've turned off your targeting computer! Is everything okay?
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
I'm a soldier. 25B, to be exact. Those of you serving will instantly recognize that nomenclature as an MOS designator. In sum: my job. I run networks and computer systems for the Army. Being a soldier means that sometimes I get to maintain networks and networked systems while being shot at or blown up. I use the same equipment you use, I just use it a little harder than you do. Dell, Cisco, Windows XP, Sandisk, etc. Yes, we even use Solaris (and yes, it still sucks. 6 minutes to boot a combat system that soldier's lives' depend on is, how should I put it, a really *BAD* design). No, this isn't an endorsement. My feelings towards the brands are irrelevant. If I get back from a convoy or a patrol alive (and I've done plenty of both in Iraq), then my gear did it's job. If my gear keeps me from maintaining control of a situation, I die. You might get a reprimand at your job for failing, I get shot full of holes in mine. I can tell you that the Army did the same thing with the FCS program as it did with other, equally worthless combat systems: Spent years catering to and blowing defense contractors, who are all too happy to hoover up every dollar they can get their filthy hands on. With projects running 5-10 years, it's not hard to see why the top-of-the-line solution (you reading this, BFT programmer? I will CHOKE YOU OUT you if I ever see you in RL) becomes a flaming sack of crap by the time it gets to the soldiers. Seen it quite a few times, and I'm not looking forward to all the hand-jobs my chain of command will be giving the embedded defense contractors when they finally come to my unit with all that shiny new junk. Just give me my M4 with an M203 (oh, by the way, can I PLEASE get some rounds for that 203? It's eight pounds of deadweight without them) and a PLGR and I am good. I've been in some very, very tight spots on the streets of Baghdad, and I can tell you firsthand that the *LAST* thing you will do when you are getting shot at is looking at a Gameboy-sized screen to see where your buddies are. You'll have eyes on them, believe me. You won't let them out of your sight.
The Armed Forces don't need all this gadetry. If they really want to attract the Nintendo generation soldiers we have these days (while getting, ahem, the most bang for their buck), they'll build Robotech style Mechs and a bunch of remote controlled dronebots and send them in to the slaughter. The days of the individual soldier are coming to an end. Too bad the "romance" of Point Du Hoc and Hamburger Hill combined with squad-based infantry tactics (everybody loved Saving Private Ryan, right? Right!) keeps the old men who run the whole thing from just accepting reality, getting an AOL account so they can see what the world is really like these days and cutting off the leeching defense contractors who take a million bucks to duct tape a thirty dollar Logitech webcam to the front of an outdated semi-automatic rifle. Iron Thunder.
End of Line.
And no promise of secrecy will make me feel any different about this. Once the tape of it exists, you have no control over how it will be used against you.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If a soldier isn't complaing then said soldier must be dead.
They're running Linux on a wireless networked system that soldier's lives depend on?
Way to cut costs there, guys. They should be running a lean proprietary system that doesn't have its source code WIDELY AVAILABLE TO EVERY SINGLE ENEMY OF OURS UNDER THE SUN.
Also, no wonder it runs like ass on a 400-mhz system- I can't believe they couldn't create a leaner ground-up system.
I hope all the countries we fight are ass-backwards, and haven't discovered that computer systems with common os's can be broken into.
I mean, the enemy only needs to get their hands on one of these to reverse-engineer it and turn it against us. They need to get these retarded things off our soldiers backs before someone gets hurt. Back to the drawing board, I say. Make a more high quality system for ground commanders and scrap the 'every soldier is a lunix computar' plot.
Look, even with a day pack, if you're carrying full ammo load, some extra frags and a pop-top launcher, plus the usual gigo stuff they load you with, you'll be sweating to the moldies with that much extra weight.
I used to hump 70 kg (that's 150 pounds, boys and girls) as a combat FN C2 gunner in a combat engineer unit, and we were insane. In the heat, the kind of extra weight that 16 pounds adds is enough to get you killed.
That plus you're already in full record mode in battle, with too much info to figure out.
The only thing that even makes sense is a very light optical cam on the helmet (built-in) and mike, feeding in to a microradio and with a mini earpiece so you can hear (and promptly ignore) the CP orders that have zilch to do with the situation on the ground.
Some CQ REMFs must have thought this payload up, cause it's only going to get more of us killed and feather the retirement nests of the upper brass that have us in an unwinnable war.
Nuff said.
SNAFU.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
in case you didn't notice, there is a certain ideologically opposed country that has a lot more people than we do. Force multipliers might just save our hide one of these days.
Couldn't you wire a wireless signal detector keyfob to a bomb and cause major problems for this "super high tech" setup?
Damn stright they run Linux. I can see it now:
...
Load weapon. Do you want to permit or deny this application? Yes, YES!
I'm sorry, I can't permit you to load your weapon if you don't answer properly
*SMASH*
works fine now.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...is that expensive military gadgets are big business. Spending money on training a soldier, providing good veterans benefits are all right out because this doesn't make anyone any money, but attaching a playstation 3 to a soldier's helmet is a huge contract that someone could make a huge profit off of (and not just in this administration; this has been true since the start of the cold war).
We should be spending money on training and intelligence gathering. The military is suffering from the same tech envy as the rest of the population is suffering, and yet they have no one to be envious of. The enemy can blow up your $100,000 humvee with $5 worth of materials available in a third world country corner store. They don't care how big your guns or computers are. Spend some goddamn money on real intelligence gathering and building knowledge and experience of your troops.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Give me twenty million, and let me pick my team. I'll have something better for you in two years, and I'll make COTS compliant, how about that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Check out the screenshots. A GUI? A fricking email application with drafts, multiple mailboxes and priorities? A fully editable map?
This is a classic example of badly conceived and designed IT implemented by indifferent lifer government contractors working off of ridiculous 2000-page requirement docs instead of, you know, what troopers actually need. They spend all their time on jamming in 800 features that will never be used, and let the fundamentals (battery life and system responsiveness) go to pot because they don't show up in the demos.
Map with location icons. Gun camera. Simple broadcast texting. That's all you need. Instead some clueless program manager decided it was critically important for a tactical rig to have all the features of his darling Outlook.
From TFA
I heard this pretty much every time new gear came to the boat. It was never as useful as the old stuff, and breaks more often too. (Sometimes, _very_ rarely, it's actually true.) Sounds like a Seargeant that needs to be busted and someone who will do the job put in his place. The job of a Sgt. is to teach people how to use and integrate the gear into their tactics. If his people don't or won't use the gear - it's his job to find out why, and report the same up the chain.
the 'bluefor tracker' (blue-force tracking) system works well when it works. however in a fast paced environment most units in the army don't have time to make it work correctly 100% of the time. this being said i cant see a more advanced system even remotely being useful on the battlefield. from the 15 months i was on the ground in iraq we used blufor tracking maybe 4/5 months for missions. the other 10/11 months it was either not working correctly or wasnt working at all. i can totally relate to having extra and seemingly useless equipment to carry. i dont think "land warrior" will be any better.
Progress defines me
Noise canceling headphones rock!
I have a set, they amplify ambient sounds (crunch of gravel under foot, whispers, vehicle engines in the distance)and clip the amplitude peaks of loud or sudden sounds.
You can hear whispered sighting instructions yet protect your hearing when you squeeze the trigger (muffled boom) and right back to whispered conversation.
So, they should use Macs? :)
Install DRM on it and give it to the enemy. Then all you have to do is sneak up behind them while they're on the phone with tec support.
So, what happens when the smart other side captures one of our soldiers?
1. Someone in a bunker monitoring the soldiers head cam pushes a button.
2. Solider explodes.
3. Word 2007 automatically prints a mail merge form to soldier's family expressing condolences.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I was an 11B. I humped 80+ pounds whenever we went to the field. We would carry 3+ days worth of MRE's, personal ammo, water. We would split up the radio operator's spare batteries. The spare ammo for the 2 M-60's our platoon would carry. We would carry IV bags, medical supplies, spare clothes. Demolitions, Rope.... the list goes ON AND ON. Point being, when all this crap added up you barely had enough room for spare socks.. forget a sleeping bag, even in 32 degree weather. Now... on top of all that, they want you to hump a helmet camera? a small back mounted pc? They better include a powered exoskeleton because there is no way that is going to happen in any realistic combat scenario.
From the article:
. stm
"It's similar to a vehicle-mounted system, Blue Force Tracker, which has been credited with turbocharging the American push to Baghdad in 2003 and reducing friendly fire incidents in Iraq."
From the BBC:
"The US pilots who killed a UK soldier in a "friendly fire" incident in Iraq were cleared of wrongdoing by a US military investigation" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6337137
Oh well.
Load weapon. Do you want to permit or deny this application? Yes, YES!
I'm sorry, I can't permit you to load your weapon if you don't answer properly
*SMASH*
works fine now. When did I mention Windows? There's no reason to run a mainstream consumer operating system on an assault rifle and adjoined headpiece.
You're an asshole, but I couldn't help laughing :)
It might be a problem in a total-war battle against a competent enemy, but it's not really an issue under current combat conditions.
... of these "Land Soldier" equipped soldiers, so I can send off some "Get Out of The Army Fast" spams?
I did a small part of the reqs for the network-centric part of the system. Without more detailed info, I can't tell if they took all of my team's recommendations or not. It seems like it does what it is supposed to do, but really badly. This is sad, because we were excited that we could really help "the grunts", as an ex-tanker put it. We really tried to make a good system, and it looks like the implementation got blown.
Makes me embarrassed.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
maybe you should credit the source where you got your info from?
- 47_and_M16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_AK
They could call it iKill. It would be functionable and lickable too!
The problem with this system is that it just plain misses the point.
Let's start off with the interface. Why is it hanging in front of half your face? If I'm being shot at, my first concern is going to be shooting back accurately, and if that damn thing gets in my way it's going off and not coming back till after everything is done.
The preferred option should have been a full width half-visor, similar to a hockey visor. See-through (probably slightly tinted), non shiny, not-in-the-way, but if you want data displayed on it, you can use it as a projection surface. Build the projection hardware into the helmet. You don't need much, because really, you don't need full-colour 30FPS.
Now, I do believe everyone should have an earpiece and short-range transmitting microphone built into the helmet as well. That just makes sense.
Video... yes, let's wirelessly link video from your gun into a projection on your helmet. But let's not go adding stuff just for fun. Change up the scope, take it from optical to digital, and in filters for night-scope, infra, etc, display it on a nice small TFT at the back of the scope, and wirelessly send it to the helmet. Now your gun is still mostly the same, but you have this extra functionality without more shit hanging from your kit.
Wires... why the hell does this thing have wires everywhere? They're a hazard waiting for an excuse to fuck you up. The only possible visible wire should be power from the body-mounted battery pack to the helmet. Everything else should be built in surface connections on your armour. A full-function controller on your forearm, powered by a surface pad connection on your jacket, is really the only other thing that should be out.
And while we're at it... is the M16 really the gun of choice for urban combat? The feedback I've had from people who've been over there has been that it's simply too big, too long, for the majority of what they do. It's great to be able to sniper some sucker from 500ft, but when all you want to do is crawl under the jeep, shoot the guy on the corner, then sneak around the corner and shoot the other guys, it's just too long. Let's switch up to a shorter, stockier gun (but with the same ammo, otherwise it's a nightmare). That guy in Israel demo'd the Amazing Folding Gun last year, that's a perfect bet. No need to expose yourself, you can do new and nifty things with it, and having the screen on the back end of the gun means that can be your one main place for information. Power it with contact pads on your gloves, so no wires between you and the gun.
And speaking of information... this is the one part that worries me. You're taking these soldiers, who have to keep their location 100% secret or they die, and sticking a transmitter on them. It doesn't matter if it's encrypted, or if it goes up to a satellite or connects to AOL and uses a Buddy List to update everyone on where you are... it's still putting out power, and it's not gonna take long before someone goes "Hey, I don't need to know what is being sent out, I just have to get a scanner to see if there's any signals being radiated, and from where". Broadcasting your location probably isn't the best idea, it's just a matter of time until it gets you killed.
So what extra EQ do we have here? A visor, small LED projection system, and a mike... maybe an extra kilo? Probably not even. Weight penalties from changes to the gunsight are offset by the new model. Extra weight for the folding stock and screen. 2 kilos, max, but worth it for the functionality. Running all this shouldn't take much, hell, the new Palms have enough processing power. And with such little equipment, batteries suddenly became a whole lot lighter. Now you have a much more effective soldier, in audio communication on demand, and he isn't burdened by 17 pounds of crap that looked cool in 1999.
The focus of this project should have been "Improving the soldier", not "Improving the middle-level managers ability to micromanage". Give the soldier more info, easy communications, better visuals (night,
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.
War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over.
--William Tecumseh Sherman.
One of the greatest warriors who ever lived.
Look at the program "Jihad" that's been airing for the past couple days (tonight has an episode) on PBS. It's really not as simple as people make it out to be.
By you guys knowledge of weaponry. It's scary to say the least. I know very little about guns. I don't want to as I'm not a police officer on or the military, those are the only two reasons ANYONE should know or own a gun. Owning guns breeds violence as proven recently so brutally.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
You obviously don't know the proper role of the Military, which is the KILL people and BREAK things.
Actually, the proper role of a military unit is to project chaos and confusion on the enemy and cause their forces to become incapable of functioning.
Sometimes that involves killing them and breaking things, but more often not.
In fact, wounding someone is a great way to slow down lots of people. Killing makes it easy to leave the body there. Wounded people are noisy, demand attention, distract the unit, and give away information even if they don't realize it.
Breaking things is just fun.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Tux isn't going to be very popular with these guys...
This sig is intentionally left blank
I'd start bitching that my crossbow isn't as accurate at 500 yards as its Half-Life copycat.
Mine is, but it's equally imaginary.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Well, I served as a Sergeant (Army). The job of the Sergeant, at least in my units, was to make sure everyone was effective and on-mission. Gear that gets in the way is useless. Ditch it until you need it for another mission, back with the ruck.
I heard this pretty much every time new gear came to the boat. It was never as useful as the old stuff, and breaks more often too. (Sometimes, _very_ rarely, it's actually true.) Sounds like a Seargeant that needs to be busted and someone who will do the job put in his place. The job of a Sgt. is to teach people how to use and integrate the gear into their tactics. If his people don't or won't use the gear - it's his job to find out why, and report the same up the chain.
Wrong. The problem is it gets into the way of doing the job. You already have an extra load for the body armor, the ambient heat is off the scale (Iraq), and they want you to carry more that gets in the way of doing the job? Just look at the flip visor - can't be flipped up, makes you sweat more, makes it hard to use your rifle (unless you fire mid-waist and miss most of the time), and it adds more info than you can handle.
Minimal feedback - think like the mini-map in WoW - something small and unobtrusive out of the main field of vision, in case you get lost or turned around. Same for the camera - downsize so it's a mini-cam like in your cell. Same for the headset - all you need is a micro bud that hangs off your earlobe. That would cut the weight - plus the weight of the batteries - way way way down.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Eugene Stoner designed the M16 and saw service with the Marines during WWII. He was a professional design engineer with Colt and also designed the current Marine Sniper rifle, the Mk 11 Mod 0, through Knights Armament.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Most of the high tech crap is just one more thing that breaks when it counts though. One could turn that argument around couldn't one? You'd be surprised how little you mind a few extra grams when it means your AK-47 bullet can shoot through things an that will stop an M16 bullet. Comparing the AK and the M16 is really a bit like comparing a lynx with a dog, they are both predators but fit into somewhat different niches. The M16 has more accuracy, is more ergonomic, it's slightly lighter and kicks less. The AK has more penetrating power due to it's larger bullet, it's harder to fire from a prone position and it's less accurate but it will fire after you have filled it with mudy water and driven a truck over it (i've seen that done). Out in the open the M16 is better due to being more effective at long range, in any other situation I would pick the AK and there are AK variants with considerably better accuracy than the mass made early Soviet stuff (let's not even get into the frighteningly badly made Chinese knockoffs). I have read a number of AK-47 vs. M16 pissing contests. M16 fans argue it's lack of power doesn't matter because that's what squad machine guns and vehicle mounted
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm sure a large amount of the older crowd (and a fair chunk of the younger one) got into tech, or gained tech experience working for the military. My father, who's probably poking around this thread somewhere, for instance was in the military and did a great deal of tech work for them as a civilian later... The military employs a lot of tech people, and it trains a lot, combine that with history geeks who know a lot about weapons and of course there'll be lots of military-knowledgeable people here
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Its such a distraction... I play video games alot, mostly FPS and ww2 type tactics. This would be extremely distracting and would most likely cause deaths. Now if they were to change the STYLE of what they are making it might still have some use, instead of one eye being used, make it so its a WHOLE glasses type unit. The unit should outline people that it can recognize and outline it like the terminator. As for shooting the gun have it connected to the glasses so instead of putting your eye on the scope, all you do is put it close to your face, and your GLASSES would come up as the scope for the gun. Use the same button tactic as they mentioned (buttons on the gun) to control the scope. Might i point out a HUGE benefit for this, instead of using 1 eye to find a target, you now can use BOTH eyes, better depth perception.
it wouldnt be that hard to make
No different than a "network admin" thinking that Claude Shannon is "1940's" bandwith theory (Yeah! Like math goes out of fashion or something)
Barely trained soldiers? How did this get modded insightful.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now. - Ed Howd
The designer of the M-16 saw combat in WW2. And this was modded up +5?
The article did mention that when the unit goes to Iraq, only squad leaders. will use the full gear with the eyepiece. It makes more sense as they are the ones who will need to coordinate the squads movements and are in a position to watch and manage. However, in looking at the screen shots of the user interface, I can see IM screens. What possible use could IM be for a soldier in a combat situation?
"The maker of any tool has to be aware that their tool can be used for negative things. Given that, if they still decide to create the tool then they are in no moral position to complain about it."
We at Novell* agree.
*Don't forget us over at Tivo!
One soldier picked up the helmet cam and said "What? No wireless?" Another said "this thing has less space than a nomad!"
You basically read my mind from the drive home. Though, I was trying to figure out what critical point(s) could be used for detection. Helmet strap connector? It would have to be something that would still provide some ease of use and not be too prone to failure (i.e. connector starts to get flaky or the enemy can still remove it with some work, such as loosening the adjustment on the helmet strap instead of uncoupling it). Of course, there's still that duress and coercion thing.
Does the drumkit attachment drown out the eAno?
Sure, there has been a lot of tech that has saved lives in warfare. But the article also reminds me of a quote I once read:
"A computer with a bullet in it is a paperweight. A map with a bullet in it is still a map."
Unfortunately the source escapes my memory at the moment.
The average soldier carries not just his gun and a helmet. There's food, medical equipment, ammo, more ammo, even more ammo, some grenades, spare parts for your technical equipment (like batteries for your radio junkie or another barrel for an MG), the list goes on. You haul around a few pounds and usually you already wonder where to put it, not to mention where the jeep is waiting to haul that junk around.
Every single piece, though, is there because YOU will need it. It will serve you to stay alive. It will kill your enemy, it will give you a chance to survive 'til help comes around in case you get shot, it enables you to call for help in the first place. Every piece has to be "worth" its weight.
8 pounds doesn't sound like a lot (hey, my laptop weighs more with ist case), but you don't just carry 8 pounds around. You carry that on top of the other stuff. As everyone who's into hiking will tell you, 8 pounds more or less carried over 30 miles means a sizable difference. Don't believe me? Try it. Take your laptop to work with you and walk that last mile. Then do it without. You WILL notice a difference, trust me!
So that equipment has to be "worth" those 8 pounds. Its value comes supposedly from additional information. Like what? Position of your buddies? You better know that anyway or what the hell are you doing there without proper training? A map? Nice to have, but useless in a firefight when you have better things to do than looking at a map. And maps weigh less. What's worse, either feature would distract you from what's happening right in front of you.
Even those amongst you who never had any military training will know that when they've been playing some shooter game with a built in map. Do you have time to ponder the directions on the on screen map when people are shooting at you?
What COULD be a leap ahead would be some kind of "target marker" that designates an identified hostile, not on some map but right on your visual arc. This in turn is near impossible.
So I can well see why soldiers aren't too happy with it. It means that they either have to leave 8 pounds of equipment they need behind or haul around 8 pounds more. And for what it seems, it's 8 pounds that don't really add to their efficiency in combat.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sensor that triggers if helmet is removed that performs a quick lock. Entering the correct password returns to normal function. Entering anything else sends out a notification to command that the equipment has been captured. Command can then send false information to it.
Sure there are going to be cases when this stuff isn't needed but it is there for when it IS NEEDed. How many times have we seen video of soldiers sticking their arm and rifle out around a corner and blindly pulling the trigger. Now, they'll have the ability to see where they are shooting and can even turn on a laser sight to pinpoint the target without sticking their head out. And with the GPS location systems, when they must split up to track down the bad guys, they'll know when their own guys are coming back around towards them. Unlike how Pat Tillman's own men didn't know it was the 2nd half of the platoon coming back to help out.
But, it's going to come down to training. If the soldiers don't know how to quickly switch the display to IR, enable/disable the laser sight, get to the battlefield display layout screen, etc, it's going to be nothing more than extra weight to carry around.
I think the jury is still out on this one.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Is that a familiar looking penguin I see in the upper left corner of screenshot #1? And if so, will Department of Defense be giving anything back to the open source community? I, for one, could surely use an M203 grenade launcher. Might come in handy during my next performance review.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"As a matter of fact, I think it is probably a good thing for all meat eaters to either go hunting at least once (where a kill is made), or work at an abattoir for a day. I think that people are too disconnected from reality of where our food comes from and that *really* understanding that we eat other (formerly) living things makes us a bit more human."
So what are the guys at the International Space Station going to hunt?
Remotely controlled robots where the human interface is just like playing a game (safe from real hard and point scoring), but with the added advantage of anon. protection when needed.
Who wouldn't like that?
Humans that have to face the kill bots.
One of my good buddies just deployed to Iraq on Easter. We were talking about the Land Warrior in the bar the night before he left. With the full land warrior setup on, his gear weighs 96 pounds! 28 pounds of that is from Land Warrior crap. He only weighs about 150 pounds! He's a combat medic, so he doesn't get much use out of any of the tactical info it provides, he just gets to haul an extra 17% of his body weight around.
He relayed a story of how he once spent 15 minutes dancing around like a monkey trying during a training exercise trying to get a battery pack for the Land Warrior to flip over the top of his gear into place. A Colonel watched it happen, and shortly after the exercise it was announced that the Land Warrior was now optional for their Brigade.
He also said the wireless on the things suck. hard. If you're in a metal enclosure of any kind (say a Stryker vehicle!!!) then you can't get updates. During another training exercise a group in a Humvee drove almost a mile off course before one of the soldiers had to open a hatch and stick his head out the top to get an update. I'm sure there was some kind of workaround where he could have patched into an antenna on the vehicle, but they obviously couldn't figure it out. Relying on bad data cause you can't figure out a technological system to get good data is worse than putting a blindfold on your driver and just having him hit the gas.
Assault rifles came about as a compromise with cartridges, logistics (how many rounds can you hump and keep supplied to the front). The military wanted something with the firepower of a subgun, which typically used pistol caliber cartridges (typically 9mm or .45 for small example), but they needed it to be controllable and powerful enough to use out to 300 meters or even better, and full sized battle rifle cartridges (typical ww2, 30-06, .303, 8mm, etc) that had that range and a lot more were found to be not very good in full auto in a hand held weapon, at least to issue to your general grunt as the basic infantry weapon. Hence the compromise cartridge, then they designed guns around that concept. Nowadays they are even thinking of going smaller, to 17 caliber to replace the .223 or to something around 7mm to replace the .308 for the squad autos)(BTW, the ak with the 7.62x39 is plenty good enough for whitetails, it has more or less the same ballistics as the classic "deer harvester" 30-30). Of the two I would say I prefer the ak over the 16, all things considered.
Part of it also was they (they being most militaries) stopped emphasizing marksmanship as much (plus none of them get raw recruits in huge who had already accrued rifle training and experience coming in like they used to in the olden days), they wanted something they could issue to pretty raw recruits that would be effective enough for the situation even with just an hour's indoctrination into basic handling. Either of those two rifles fit the bill in that respect, the ak or m16, they are designed to be more or less idiot proof given at least marginally consistent ammunition.
Interesting little point, the soviet rifle before the ak was the sks, which is a greatly scaled down anti aircraft weapon.
With that said, and given I own or have owned "all of the above" and more, I would prefer a semi auto shotgun for close range, and a heavy bolt gun for most other situations when it came to self defense. I like to shoot the "assault" guns, but seeing as how I have no helicopters airdropping me the ammo, I prefer the bolt gun with very expensive glass and actual thought about placed shots. To each their own, all these various guns have a purpose, and self defense against badguys of any kind is as legit as any other.
I agree with everything you're saying, but in addition I'd just like to make one point:
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
Very few actual combat troops, to my knowledge, are even using the M-16A2 with the 20" barrel -- most people I know, at least the ones actually doing patrols in Iraq, were issued one of the newer carbine-length varieties with a 14" barrel. Lots of muzzle flash, slightly reduced velocity, but a whole lot handier. There's nothing besides U.S. Army stubbornness (insisting that the next war would be a setpiece battle where soldiers would be shooting at each other's armored heads from 350 yards away) that said you had to put a barrel that long on the action.
Granted, most of this stuff about small-caliber ammunition and carbine-length weapons being really neat was figured out by the Germans (to basically no effect, but for unrelated reasons) 50 years ago, and in some ways I think the Russians caught on a lot quicker, but the AK as a weapon really isn't as superior to the AR-15/M16 variants as it has a reputation for being.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I know your post was tongue in cheek, but somehow a trailer with a soldier exploding button to be captured on the battle field might not be the best of ideas.. yet, morbidly amusing.
>(you reading this, BFT programmer? I will CHOKE YOU OUT you if I ever see you in RL)
Yeah, I'm reading this.
I didn't work on BFT directly, but did write a lot of the code for the system it's built on (FBCB2). We saw the Land Warrior system in the early days and we knew it wouldn't fly. Nobody was really listening to us back then either.
Before you start your bad-ass kung fu shit choke move on me, let me point out a few things:
1. We (developers) don't get much of a choice *most* of the time on some of these projects. PHB's exist in the defense world just like they do in the Real World [tm].
2. We KNOW some of these systems are huge steaming turds. We don't like them either but we do what we can to make sure they work and are as useful and reliable as we can make them. You can afford to not sweat the details writing a game. You can't in real life.
3. We also operate under a fog of war. Information doesn't flow down to us most of the time. Decisions get made by higher ups and we hear about them sometimes days before we have to ship. We do a LOT of guessing on what YOU need and how YOU will use the system. It sucks but think about how bad they would be if we didn't.
4. We realize that lives depend on them working properly. I personally have had to work on code for fixes that were needed immediately out in the field (Afghanistan, initial Iraq invasion). We've pulled all nighters to get the patches out that were urgently needed for a mission.
For the rest of the slashdot crowd:
Yes, we run linux. Be grateful. We used to run SCO.
Other similar C2 systems allow an administrator to remotely challenge a user to authenticate himself.
The admin can also configure the network to lock out and stop updating a suspect device. The location information is still inside, but it becomes stale fairly quickly and it is usually filtered to the user's area of interest (e.g. PFC Snuffy does not usually need to know, nor care, about the location of someone 10 KM away).
The intended result is to make the possible loss of information from a compromised device not much higher than we had with paper maps and lap boards.
This one is up to date and real time, and it's designed to be with the actual frontline soldiers.
They'll retaliate
With stolen technology
Won't we be screwed then
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
From the blue-screen-of-death dept.
The comparison with Ghost Recon is apt, because that is the sort of interface one can imagine for human controllers of remote robotic combat units. Combine it with a reasonably robust semi-autonomous combat robot, even one on wheels, and it's a whole new ballgame.
If we're haggling about weight, the electronic crap that this article is about weights 16 pounds. About as much as two rifles.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, it's their knowledge of guns that gives me some comfort. The people you see commenting about firearms here on Slashdot are the very last sort of people you're going to see committing a massacre, are the ones most likely to successfully use a firearm in a defensive situation, and least likely to shoot someone by accident. I'd rather have one of them holding a gun on me than you. At least, if I get shot it'll be because they had a good reason to shoot me, not because they pulled the trigger by accident.
... only a machine. A gun is not an object worthy of such an emotional response, any more than your car or your refrigerator. Keep in mind that our nation was founded by people who saw the value of such machines, and in fact our freedoms were secured because they used those weapons well.
... but I acknowledge that guns are power, and as such may ultimately be the only form of power We the People have when the political process fails us completely (that is unavoidable, we all know it, the Founders knew it: it is only a matter of when.) In the meantime, I'm glad there are people out there who aren't cops, professional soldiers, or crooks, who own firearms and know how to use them. As I said, guns are power and I see no reason why one side should have all of it. Neither would you, if you were to look at the situation a little more dispassionately.
You, on the other hand, are someone who by his own admission, knows nothing of what he is talking about, knows nothing of what is being discussed, and has expressed fear and loathing of what is, after all
Now, I don't own a gun, either
As an initiation into the world of firearms and defensive gun usage, I would recommend that you to check out the writings of one Gary Kleck. Here's another article. I'm sure you can Google for more (those are just the top few links I found by typing his name.)
It's eye-opening stuff, and he has the math and the numbers to back it up. I guarantee it will thoroughly upset your worldview, but sometimes the truth hurts.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm in the US Army, and I agree. I'd like to have *lighter* body armor with flexible plates that cover more of my body, a more reliable rifle, and better issued boots.
As far as night operations go, the only thing I wish we could get is a set of nods that aren't as long as a toilet paper tube and don't look like you're looking through one. If we could have nods that covered both eyes like a pair of PVS-15's and were only 0.5-1 inch long I would be ecstatic.
Soldiers don't like the Land Warrior setup because it sucks. It's big, heavy, unreliable, battery powered (which means you need to carry spares) and distracts from the real threats to our soldiers, i.e. suicide bombers, snipers, and IED's. You need all your senses to find these before they find you, and having a display in your eye telling you where your buddies are and what the ambient temperature is just distracts you from the things that are actually important.
Situational awareness is exactly what suffers here. You may know where people are and what their heart rate is, but you don't realize that the guy over there isn't holding a video camera, he's holding an rpg.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
This is /. -- what did you expect?
ROFL
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
Before accusing me of bias or jumping at conspiracies as people often do when Israel is mentioned remember that the last thing an Israeli arms company would want is for this stuff to end up in Iran, and later most likely Syria (ignore Hizbolla - they don't have the money for anything more hi-tech than obsolete rockets the Iranians sold at a discount when they upgraded their rockets). This is just a potentially tragic comedy of errors and greed and most likely very common.
From a grunt-
I agree wholeheartedly. If we put one quarter as much money towards obtaining better (i.e. lighter, flexible) body armor, boots, and rifles, not to mention nods (the PVS-14's are what, 10 years old?), we'd be in much better shape.
I already hump 65 lbs or so before I even put my ruck on; don't give me even more crap to carry that isn't going to help in 95% of the situations I will face. Seeing around corners with my weaponsight is cool, but it's not cool when the weaponsight is bigger than a thermal scope and heavier to boot. Not to mention the ridiculous wire connecting me to my weapon. I'd rather carry a thermal scope, at least they can see through walls.
Not to mention the fact that any current model of heads up display will get guys killed. Try doing any kind of CQB with that ridiculous stuff on your head. If you have live opponents you'll find yourself dead pretty quickly. It gets in the way and distracts you. Not to mention the fact that the real threats we face on a day to day basis are from things that require our complete attention to detect: IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers. I don't want to be distracted by the view from my gun's sight or my buddy's heart rate when I'm scanning. Scanning is how a soldier survives. If you're looking for the guy who's on mid-cycle leave from Iraq or Afghanistan, just find the guy who's moving his head and eyes constantly scanning and who gets tense and stops talking in large crowds. We don't need this crap distracting us from our jobs.
Give me the stuff that will actually help. Why does the 5.56 coming out of my personal weapon punch little tiny holes in people at 150 meters when it should make great big ones? Maybe we should fix that instead of spending umpteen billion dollars in order to attach a video camera to my helmet, which is already too freaking heavy. Why does my rifle malfunction if I don't treat it like a beloved little sister and baby it every 6 hours or so? Better rifle technology has been available for a decade at least. why don't I have it? Because we are spending our money jacking off the military contractors.
Hear hear.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
It seems to me that some of the ideas are just fundamentally flawed and not based on everyday experience. I know for a fact that when I'm walking down the street, listening to my i-Pod, I'm less attentive to what's around me. Even crossing a busy road requires a certain amount of extra care because I don't have the aural feedback to help me position the approaching traffic, that my ears would normally provide. And that's in a civilian setting with nothing other than speeding cars to threaten my existence.
If I was ever to find myself in close-combat where I was engaging a bunch of enemy combatants in a kill-or-be-killed situation, I'd want full possession of ALL my senses. Having my buddies voices buzzing away in my ears would be the first thing I'd want to shut off.
The human body and it's capabilities are the products of millions of years of evolution and refinement. This kit is just a few years old. Personally I'd rather trust what nature gave me.
I LOVE new pieces of gear. I'm willing to accept a few flaws and glitches to get a better set of nods, and I love finding new gadgets to try on my rifle. I've switched weapon sights many times as new technology came out and loved each new one.
I have also used the Land Warrior system. It just plain sucks. You can see some of my other posts in this topic if you want more detail but the short list is: it's too heavy, it's unreliable, it attaches your weapon to you, it's WAY too complicated for the average soldier (it's too complicated for me, and I run OpenBSD on my home system, imagine what it's like for the guy whose only email account is his AKO and he has only accessed it once when someone walked him through it), and it distracts you from the things that will get you killed.
I'm not your regular technophobe soldier, but I want a piece of gear that I know will work and won't distract me from the fight.
This isn't just bitching about new gear; this is stuff that will sit at the back of the supply cage and be brought out only for command inventory.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Well, that's one role the army plays when fighting an enemy army. You also have a) Occupation and pacification of enemy territory - troop garrisons that keep a civilian population under the control and authority of a foreign government. b) Elimination of the enemies war making capacity - This is a concept introduced this century, and pretty much involves flattening everything in site to prevent your enemy from making more weapons and soldiers, and also remove the will of the people from their leadership to continue the fight. Whether bombing people into grit actually keeps them from fighting you is highly debatable, but its still something we're doing today.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
Sure, because additional systems designed to lock out users never cause actual problems in the field...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I was already thinking about that example and was hoping someone would post it. For those that don't know, he's the guy that Apocalypse Now was supposedly based on.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Don't ask, don't tell.
IS NOT using military created tech and not wanting linux used by the military.
To be a hypocrite he would have to use linux in a similar way while condemning military use of linux.
If you don't like the position that is one thing but adding to the confusion over what a hypocrite is irresponsible.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I agree, I think this stuff could be rather useful. No one said soldiers have to use the map WHILE they are in the middle of a fight. What about before and after? What about during a fight when no one is currently shooting at you but you are trying to figure out where the rest of your men are located? This whole line of argument about the problems of using the equipment "while you are being shot at" just doesn't fly with me. Soldiers are out there being shot at about 0.1% of the time. Don't get me wrong, 0.1% of a 2 year tour is a heck of a lot of shooting - but it still isn't enough to make this technology useless.
"i stand on the edge of destruction" -shai hulud
1. Integrated biometrics so the system only works with the soldier to which the system was issued? Sounds good, but probably buggy and adds weight/expense. What would prevent the captor from detaining a soldier and coercing them to tell them information? I suppose they could be trained to give spurious responses.
On one episode of VENOM got MASKs masks, and put them on. They were all zapped, game over.
2. Soldier login and quick disable feature? Might work if the soldier is able to deactivate the system (i.e. still alive, ambulatory). Requires the soldier to remember to deactivate in the heat of the moment.
Spectrum Disabler, on!
3. Remote disable? This would rely upon an effective means of determining that an authorized user is in possession of the equipment.
They could require a nifty watch that stuns the user into submission, to be required.
Have you read my journal today?
The deer doesn't shoot back. Or, to amend it slightly: the deer don't shoot back, much less as an organized fighting force. The furniture of a gun is not cosmetic; the Assault Weapons Ban regulated the furniture of the weapon and not its action because the furniture is designed around the function that the weapon is supposed to serve. A gun designed for combat between infantrymen will have different furniture than one designed for hunters (or for snipers, for that matter).
Are you adequate?
A bigger question:
If this thing enables blue force tracking (tracking where the "good guys" are) how do they prevent the enemy from getting this information?
Sure, it'll be protected by some form of encryption, but it still involves transmitting, which means the enemy just has to notice the collection of radio transmitters coming towards them and fire at those...
The battery only lasts for 12 hours. Hopefully it'll also be of proprietary design and use an obscure voltage as to make it difficult to replace.
Like most things simpler is usually better. People under stress (i.e. combat) don't want dozens of gizmos and indicators to keep track of. Complicated gear is also more prone to breakdowns and is harder on logistics.
I've read about pilots in Vietnam who got sick of the barrage of audio signals they got in the cockpit from various instruments. They started turning them off, just leaving on their radios and SAM indicators.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
http://media.popularmechanics.com/images/warrior-s creen-1L-0507.jpg
Love the tux!
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Dear Aunt, Let's set so double the killer delete select all
Wow, reading the other replies to this makes me not feel evil for laughing at this. Especially how it's the soldier that explodes, and not his gear. For some reason it seems Monty Python-esque.
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
It's not quite that simple, you need to factor in the weight of the ammo. With the M16 you are either carrying a lighter load for the same number of rounds, or you are carrying a greater number of rounds for the same load.
That's not funny. On one of the Eyepiece View pictures there's a tux in the left top corner!r y_law/4215725.html
See pic 1 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/milita
You can compare database upgrades to military gear upgrades when a failure to be familiar with the new equipment can get you killed.
Pssh. The advantages of Vista are obvious!
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USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
agreed. i think that's why people turn car radio volume down when concentrating on street signs or attempting to find a particular address.
un burrito me trampeó.
oh come on! a haiku answer to a haiku question and no one notices?
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
Fear that the other side would use it kept Window (now called chaff: ribbons of foil tuned roughly to the wavelength of the opponents' radar system) from use by the RAF for close to a year during the second world war. Sometimes, the balance is such that the benefit to the other side would outweigh the benefit to your own side.
yeah, reality never lives up 2 fantasy...
Why not just send hime to Iraq - it's virtually the same thing.
While everybody's busy showing off their fire weapon knowledge, am I the only one who was shocked by this retarded claim?
And some of the gear seems outdated, even before it goes off to war. The 400-MHz processor running the system would have been bleeding-edge -- in 1999.
You insensitive clod, you had 400 MHz CPU's in 1999 in desktop computers, not small embedded devices. What they have is much more comparable to a PDA, and 400 MHz is very good for a PDA, I recall you that a PSP runs by default at 333 MHz iirc, and then the system probably doesn't need much more CPU power anyways.
You just got troll'd!
What the hell have they done to the 203? When I carried it, back in the 80's, it weighed around 2 or 3 pounds. Heck, the M16A1 (which I carried)+M203 weighed less than 10 pounds.
Best Slashdot Co
AFATDS developer here. If the government would cough up for faster Solaris boxes, maybe we could boot up faster, but you know, the more stuff we put in there, oddly enough, the slower things come up.
4. We realize that lives depend on them working properly. I personally have had to work on code for fixes that were needed immediately out in the field (Afghanistan, initial Iraq invasion). We've pulled all nighters to get the patches out that were urgently needed for a mission.
Ditto here, though I haven't needed to pull an all-nighter (though I know those who have worked heinous hours to get stuff done for a patch).
Oh Dear GOD this is gonna suck. Don't get me wrong, I love gadgets and new tech, but the battlefield is not a place I want it. But I guess if I'd had mp3's and a digital player in 1990, the first gulf war wouldn't have sucked quite so much! But seriously, I can't believe the ever increasing demands place upon the common grunt. When I talk to my friends still in service, it seems like they're constantly having new crap to tote and maintain and not lose, because goddammit, you signed for it! ughh. But I'm a luddite when it comes to soldiers gear. I don't even like optics on a rifle. Plenty of range time is all you need to be familiar with your weapon. Iron sights just kind of sit there small like in your view of the world--they don't force you to see it spearately. Just my two cents. I know range time is expensive. I was a driver for my first sargeant for a couple of months before I got out, and he was amazed and somewhat troubled by my preference to not use night vision when there was a good moon. I just liked having a little bit of depth perception. I do like GPS--it's a freaking miracle tool, for soldiers and farmers and surveyors and every joe on the planet! I like modern textiles that keep you warm or cool, dry and windproofed--i kile it when your crotch doesn't rot away! And I damn sure like the new body armor. Now that's a place where R&D could pay off even more. Keep making it lighter without lessening protection. And for God's agnostic sake, don't make the next rifle heavier and bulkier! Sorry for the rant...
Another 16 pounds would suck.
And the display apparently isn't a HUD. Looks more like an eye patch and a blind spot. I know if I were infantry lugging a weapon there is nothing I would welcome more than something that ruins my stereoscopic vision in a life-threatening reaction-time situation.
Looking at the diagram of the kit, there is actually a "mouse" (item D) for controlling user input. I don't really understand the need for that, especially since disabled people (and maybe fighter pilots) have menu systems that are controlled directly by sight. Having to put down your weapon just to read a map in order to find out where everyone else is, doesn't really seem a good idea. Couldn't they just overlay a number of coloured rectangles (scaled by distance) with name-tags over the normal view, so that the guy could get an idea of where everyone is?
Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his power level?
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Full FOV night vision, heads up display, 4MB iPod, and 802.11N networking all in a 12 oz. package. And the best part, it only requires one button! The only problem is that the battery is not replaceable.
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
You can sent crack troops in to Baghdad but they won't be much use if all they're taught to do is shoot any towelhead that looks at them funny. As other posters (with far more insight into the situation than I) have mentioned, there's no way the US can "win the war" without the support of the Iraqi people, and to do that (if it's possible that this stage), a completely different approach is needed.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
HOT DAMN! When did the /. response format turn to haiku?
Sure, that's your job (or at least part of it), in the field or on exercise. But you know well there is a whole supporting pyramid below that.
The problem is that you read what I wrote/quoted - but you didn't bother to think about it. The quoted Sgt didn't say it had problems, didn't say it didn't work, didn't say it interfered with his mission... he said they didn't use it. Now I know this is a quote - but that is very odd phraseology.
This is a bad idea. Here's why. The system tells you where your "friends" are. So if one guy gets shot and his helmet taken by the enemy, there's no hiding for the rest of the team, now, is there...
Yeah, HMDs are just not that useful, except maybe if registration issues in augmented 3D reality display can be solved completely, or it serves as just a tiny area of your FOV for alerts. If it were up to me I'd put all that stuff on a small PDA you can slip out of a pocket when you're in a safe place and are able to focus on it. Then have spatialized audio cues in the audio channel for critical events.
Having full earphones covering your ears also sounds like a bit of a mistake. You'll be deaf when your battery dies and they become expensive earmuffs.
Doesn't it kind of scare you how much people on Slashdot know about assault weapons?
No.
There are usually other tools more suitable to solving problems. Since most Slashdotters have high conceptual flexibility (if not outright ADHD), they won't merely fixate on the first possible solution they encounter. It takes a different kind of monomania to be dangerous than the sort that scream "VI!" "EMACS!" "VI!" "EMACS!" at each other — those recognize the possibility of another viewpoint, they merely think the other viewpoint is idiotic. It's the ones with narrow vision who can ever only see one course of action being possible that you need to fear.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You also have a) Occupation and pacification of enemy territory - troop garrisons that keep a civilian population under the control and authority of a foreign government. b) Elimination of the enemies war making capacity
How's that working for you?
Thought so.
I return to my original statement, and stand by it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because sometimes you have to realize that to do your job properly, you need to ignore the demands of higher ups in a creative way.
That is the path to success.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Working for whom? Did I imply that it was proper, necessary, worthwhile, or moral? I'm fairly sure I didn't, but sorry if I did. Nevertheless, Occupation has been a long established (and often successful in its objectives) use of military forces, from the Romans to the British. Until recently eliminating an enemies war making capacity really wasn't an available or obtainable option until the enemy's army was subdued, and in that case its pretty much razing their cities (see Carthage, Hiroshima). Evidence for its practicality in modern times is dubious at best, as there's much debate to whether the Allied bombing campaign did much to stop German production (hint: German weapons production steadily increased until the Allies were practically on the doorstep of Germany).
See, you can always justify something.
Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is there a point in there I should be searching for? I do not follow.
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