Slashdot Mirror
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."
20. Never forget that your weapon is made by little kids in China contracted by a subcontractor of the highest campaign contributer.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
True the AK47 is more reliable, it's loose tolerances will make it fire after being dipped in mud. Being heavier is irrelevant, overall weight savings means a soldier can carry more ammo. In the art of killing humans, I'd take the accuracy of the M-16 anyday.
Or, just check this out and make your own conclusion...
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.
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.
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 obviously don't know the proper role of the Military, which is the KILL people and BREAK things. Quite frankly, I want them to be the most efficient in these tasks.
...
On the other hand, they should be last resort
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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."
"One of the bulldozers uncovered the decomposing body of an enemy soldier, complete with AK47. I happened to be standing right there, looking down into the hole and pulled the AK out of the bog. "Watch this, guys," I said, "and I'll show you how a real infantry weapon works." I pulled the bolt back and fired 30 rounds -- the AK could have been cleaned that day rather than buried in glug for a year or so. That was the kind of weapon our soldiers needed, not the confidence-sapping M16."
Col.David hackworth
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Yes, the two weapons have different calibers. That is actually another aspect of the AKs that make them superior. The 7.62 millimeter round is slightly larger and heavier than the 5.56 millimeter M-16 round, but this is good. The 7.62 millimeter round is the old "NATO" round from the Korean conflict. There's a LOT of ammunition floating around in that size. Try finding suitable quantities of 5.56 millimeter ammunition if you have an AR-16.
In summary, EVERYBODY wants an AK. Only collectors and guys out of the US military have any use for an M/AR-16.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Sure - because you can buy the AK47 everybody can buy from his Uncle's cousin Oleg Gregorianovich and where he would not get the M16 from Uncle SAM.
Wrong. The AK47 uses a special "short" version of the 7.62, so you can NOT your your standard machinegun ammo like with the H&K G3. And every single one of the newer NATO-Country rifles (Steyr, Enfield, H&K) are using 5.65 now.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! --
More recently a lot of troops are being issued M4s. Its shorter gas system appears to be less reliable, in large part because combustion gases have to much less distance to travel before being dumped into the receiver.
Much of the work to replace the weapon revolves around a minor change to the receiver. Making the combustion gases drive a piston that unlocks the bolt. Sealing the gases out of the relatively delicate internal goings on helps a lot, especially on full auto and burst fire weapons.
The other end of why people think the platform is unreliable is because the M4's rail foreend allows a person to defile an otherwise light and quick handling rifle by clamping lasers and lights and night vision and cameras and scopes and pinball machines to it. Now, instead of a properly balanced 8 lb rifle you have an 8 lb rifle with 30 lbs of gear hanging off the end of it.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
It is also a question of attitude. Kalashnikov was a war hero who designed a weapon he would have liked to have when he was out there. The M16 was designed by an anonymous panel of engineers, most of whom probably never went under fire. When a Red Army soldier wielded his weapon, he had this feeling of triumph of the individuals when collectivism gave them the opportunity to express their talent. Kalashnikov himself had a lot of attitude, someone you can relate too. He even have his own brand of vodka. The AK47 was a usable device of propaganda. I think that the complaints against the current high-tech gears is exactly the alienation of faceless industrial product that Marx warned about. Isn't it ironic that it is the US who end up producing bland stuff without attitude? The free market in the US has a lot of attitude but it seems that this vital force that gives products their identity decided to completely avoid anything related to bureaucracy.
I have served in the Swedish army, and what you say is not related to the position that I was in, e.g. a lot of night operations in small teams. While there are a lot of situations where the land warrior is virtually useless, there is a ton of them that are extremely useful.
I would take the situational awareness factor from the land-warrior system over better body armour and a more reliable rifle. Firstly, our rifles are already reliable, and secondly the plates in the body armour stops armour breaking rounds. The SA bonus from the land warrior system would be an extremely valuable asset.
From your comment I doubt that you have ever served in any armed force unit.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
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.
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.
I agree with that. But I think it is fair to say that the intent of the makers of the weapon was for it to be used in military assaults. The AK-47 and the M16 were made specifically for the armed forces of their countries and for export to the armed forces of other countries. So calling them assault rifles is justifiable. Just because a person doesn't want to use them in an assault doesn't mean they weren't made for that purpose. BTW I spent 5 years in the armed forces (infantry), and believe in the mission in Afghanistan. Iraq is another matter entirely... I back the troops 110% (they are allied brothers in arms). It doesn't mean I have to back the politics behind their deployment.
As a note, I find target shooting enjoyable, but don't own a weapon (I really have no need for one). I don't hunt, but don't have a problem with hunters... as long as they use as much of the animal they kill as possible. Just taking a head or the skin if B.S. if you ask me. It's also OK if there is a need to manage populations that might be getting out of control due to man's influence. 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. Just my view... and I used to maintain the computer systems at a place that killed 3500 head of cattle per day for about a year. I still eat meat!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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 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."
The winners are the bastards who manufacture weapons. Everybody else loses. For all these reasons, I think a clause in the GPL oughta be added.
Res publica non dominetur