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The Soldier of the Future
An anonymous reader writes "Land Warrior, the Army's wearable electronics package, was panned earlier this year by the troops who were testing it out. They were forced to take the collection of digital maps and next-gen radios to war, anyway. Now, Wired's Noah Shachtman reports from Iraq, those same soldiers are starting to warm up to their soldier suits of the future."
Where do you clip the iPod?
Most of the stuff on
Let's see, Apple is building an entire business around user friendly appliances and have a pretty good reputation for user interface design. Why not see what they can do with it?
This is my sig.
New soldier suit + orange visor = Master Chief
The game.
Please mod this article bsod.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On The Wired article the new land warrior gear just is not worth the weight though it does seem to have some pretty cool features. The main problem the 4/9 "Manchus" had was that everyone has to wired in for it to work and usually only half of them are wired making the system not worth the extra weight.
Now, Wired's Noah Shachtman reports from Iraq, those same soldiers are starting to warm up to their soldier suits of the future.
The soldiers aren't warming up to the suits because they like them. The soldiers are warming up because the suits use Sony batteries.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...will be a machine, which may or may not be controlled by a techie in an air-conditioned office.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. "
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Yeah ... they're starting to warm up to it ... kinda ... except it's still too heavy and it doesn't work right ... and a bunch of stuff has been taken out of the original concept ... but yeah, it's great!
IOW, it's still a POS, just not quite as much a POS as before. And, oh yeah, it costs money the Army doesn't have.
Jesus. I was a grunt back in the dark ages (late 80's) and I can't tell you how glad I am that we didn't have to lug that crap around with us. The amount we did have to carry was already a killing load; the senior NCO's, who got their start in Vietnam, always told us exactly what we should throw away, and were unanimous in their opinion we were still carrying too much stuff. (And they had heard the same thing from their Korea-veteran sergeants.) Sorry, I don't believe that today's infantrymen are that much bigger and tougher than we were -- the human body hasn't changed, but the amount of crap the brass wants to load onto it keeps going up and up. And this is in the desert! Pretty soon the Iraqis won't have to kill American soldiers, just wait for them to drop dead of heatstroke.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
An anonymous reader writes
"There should be thirteen."
The Iraqis run around with just guns and walky talkys, and they seem to be doing just fine...
8-bit synth midi music from DOOM plays while in Ultraviolence mode.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I certainly hope the brass have read Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story, Superiority. Anthologized in Clifton Fadiman's Fantasia Mathematica, which a lot of libraries still have.
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
The story describes how they were continually being equipped with new and advanced weapons. They were constantly delayed while their ships were being refitted. They are constantly discovering that gadgets that seemed wonderful in tests and demonstrations have minor glitches that basically render them useless until the relatively small problems can be solved with them can be solved.
"Given time we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented...."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So is that the purpose of technology? To be more vicious and powerful beasts? If so, we are doomed. We'll never be able to keep up with our own abilities to destroy ourselves. Homo sapiens evolves at a ridiculously slow pace compared to the speeds at which our technologies are developing.
/. crowd? If you believe that computers will ultimately possess high intelligence, then you had better prey they don't develop with the morality of the Dick Cheney and his neo-GOP friends. If so, the next day after the computers realize they don't need us and can defeat us will be the last day of mankind. We had better hope they develop with something more like the morality of Gandhi.
We're probably already dangling over the pit now. No, I don't think we could actually exterminate ourselves with nuclear weapons--though the survivors of a nuclear war might well prefer that they had died cleanly. However, I think we have probably reached achieved a level of biotechnology where we could exterminate ourselves completely with a suitable bioweapon. If we continue to dedicate our technology to making ourselves into bigger and more vicious animals, to the use of ever greater force, then I really think we are doomed. (That's one resolution of the Fermi Paradox, after all.)
The point is that human beings don't have to live that way. We can decide to be reasonable and rational and agree to set rules on the competitions short of life and death battles to the death. We don't have to breed like rabbits, live like pigs, and ultimately die like dogs. We are human beings, and we can make choices and live by them.
Maybe I should pitch it the other way for the
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Islamists, are not the problem it's the crazy ass people with guns that are the problem.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/when-the-soldie.html
I would have put my comment as a reply to this post had I seen it earlier, but here's the link backwards:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=309599&cid=20762951
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I used to work on that piece of shit. The software is a piece of shit, and difficult to use if your a fucking engineer, hell the software engineers from the contractor building it had trouble working with it. So there are a few possibilities, they've made massive usability improvements, the soldiers have learned to get around all the crap they don't want/need, or they've found somebody to like about it. The usability experts didn't want to hear what anybody with half a brain had to say about it, the were just interested in what the infantry soldiers had to say about it. Which means the weren't going to do ANY improvements until the entire system was complete, and they could hand the working thing over.
1. This com system seems to be much more valuable (once debugged) than plenty of other gear the soldiers are carrying, so I would pose the question: Do any experienced soldiers see the benefit in ditching ten pounds of old gear for this gear? 2. Anyone arguing that the Iraqis are doing just as well should reconsider: they're lambs to the slaughter in a gunfight versus our trained military, and most of their successful kills result from sacrificing themselves. I'll leave the obligatory quote by Paton out - I'm sure you can guess... 3. Could it be that this is one more reason that we got into this war in the first place - to test the 'beta' designs of military research? 4. The real downside for us is this: micro-evolution; our soldiers might start using such advances as a crutch, get lazy, and then succumb to a more savvy fighter.
No matter what they end up paying for the system, the guy wearing it is going to be killed by someone eating rice or falafel who cost all of $200 to train and equip. What kind of kill ratio do you need for an even trade-off, 1000:1?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You aren't the first one to make that comment. Bill Mauldin the World War II cartoonist commented about the "efficient dime-store salesmen" who sold all the crap to the army that the grunts were supposed to lug around, crap that the grunts often shed as they walked simply because there was too much to carry and walk let alone fight.
One of his cartoons depicts two grunts walking down a road littered with discarded gas masks with one saying to the other "I see that C company got the new type gas masks."
He noted that the Brits were much leaner in part because they issued less and in part because they punished company CO's for "waste".
It's always been easy to agree to an extra 6 ounces of gear while sitting at a desk eating lunch. Carrying it and the other 50 6 ounces, now that's a bitch.
> IOW, it's still a POS, just not quite as much a POS as before. And, oh yeah, it costs money the Army doesn't have.
No, it is getting it's first real field test. Theory is meeting reality and as usual reality is winning. Sounds like the right things are happening. The soldiers are ditching the parts that aren't ready for the real world, keeping the parts that work and getting bug fixes and features added to address problems. Give it a rev or two and it will be ready for wider use.
And forget the weight problems, remember that any hardware that has made it to Iraq in such small numbers will have been designed at least a year or so ago and probably have been made as handmade prototypes. If they get the features and software right in this shakedown and get approved for a full scale manufacturing rampup they will be able to get the weight down. Maybe not immediately down to the 5 pounds the troops seem to think would make it a 'must have' but way under 10 and each revision will be smaller, lighter and have more features. It's the nature of tech.
Since it appears that fielding less than 200,000 troops is straining the US Army to the breaking point we are going to need every force multiplier we can get. And that's probably a good thing. A numerically small but well trained and equiped force is probably a better bet anyway since in a straight up brawl with either of the more likely foes (A newly formed Caliphate in the ME or the ChiComs) we might face in the next fifty years the other side is going to outnumber us so we better plan on keeping a high kill ratio.
Democrat delenda est
Maybe it's just quibbling over terminology, but the way I figure, we're already in World War IV.
The Cold War wasn't "almost" WWIII, it was WWIII. The "almost" applies to the end-of-the-world (TM) nuclear war scenario that, thankfully, didn't happen. But the fact that that disaster didn't happen doesn't mean the entire conflict doesn't "count" as a "war". Otherwise, how come we call it "the Cold War"? And it was certainly global in scope, so I figure it deserves to be counted as the next in the series of "World Wars", even if it didn't play out the way it was expected to -- we all know the nature of warfare constantly changes, right? And by the same reasoning, it makes sense to think of the "War On Terror" as the next in the series, i.e., WWIV.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I was a grunt back in the dark ages (late 80's) and I can't tell you how glad I am that we didn't have to lug that crap around with us. The amount we did have to carry was already a killing load; the senior NCO's, who got their start in Vietnam, always told us exactly what we should throw away, and were unanimous in their opinion we were still carrying too much stuff. (And they had heard the same thing from their Korea-veteran sergeants.)
I was a grunt in the early 90s, and it was of course the same problem. I was in a "light" infantry battalion. You know the joke there, of course.
SLA Marshall, in his esteemed study of combat load and its effect on battlefield performance, figured that the average soldier's load shouldn't exceed 1/3 of his weight. I recall that during one NTC rotation in the lovely Mojave Desert, all of my normal load plus my "fag bag" full of maps and code books and assorted crap, and the transmitter they forced platoon leaders to lug around, I was hauling 110 pounds. Of course it was all "necessary".
Grunts from the time of the Roman Legions have probably been complaining about excessive load.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
...the technology to allow them not to fight in an unjust war?
We can decide to be reasonable and rational and agree to set rules on the competitions short of life and death battles to the death.
Pacifism leads to death unless you have non-pacifists around to protect you. Being reasonable and fair is fine and good, and we should strive for that path, but one must also be willing and able to use deadly force in defense. Even in modern times, over a small number of generations, we have seen a population split, the two halves become isolated, one become pacifist, and when the two halves reestablish contact the pacifists are murdered and/or enlsaved by their blood relatives. Sorry, read this in a book so I don't have a link handy, the people were Pacific islanders, timeframe 19th century IIRC.
Army spends 15 years developing a system that looks good on paper and kind of works in exercises but your grunts hate because they don't see the point.
1 year into a real war and jaded grunts begin to see the advantages of the system while the designers learn how to make it more useful.
Sounds like iterative design to me!
Take that you UML/waterfall supporters!
If only for the fact that I get amused whenever I hear about it due to the descriptions of a similar system in 'world war z'.
Everything will be taken away from you.
In Soviet Russia, electronic suit warms YOU!
There seems to be something that many people here are overlooking. Regardless of whether or not relatively primitive technology can defeat all this high-tech equipment is irrelevant because the United States is actually testing it on a real battlefield. It really seems like the military is testing every piece of hardware they can get their hands on in Iraq. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't already F22s flying around out there.
It's a unique opportunity that few other military powers have had access too. It's one thing to predict your weapon will do something, but even live fire exercises are no substitute for actual combat applications. And I'm not just talking about equipment here. Certainly they're getting a ton of experience in tactics, especially urban warfare.
Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the US government doesn't enter into wars every few years to keep the whole military machine nice and lubricated.
Of course it's about killing. The only reason for a soldier not to get killed is so they can do more killing. It's only a bonus that they get to come home in one piece.
As for saving American lives... why does it matter if their American? I'm for saving lives period. I've lived on the other side of the great divide. I've been in the military. I've since decided that it's wrong to think about being just an American citizen and defending this country. To truly move forward we must think of ourselves as global citizens and care for all people. It's when we divide ourselves into groups (American, Iraqi, etc...) that we forget to see the humanity in others.
The soldier of the future doesn't exist.
Attack >
Defend >
Settings >
Shuffle Tactics >
Helmet Light >
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I wonder if there's anything to stop the enemy grabbing one of these high tech monocles off a downed soldier and playing hunt the green dots?
A new AK doesn't cost $500 in the first world. I got mine for $289.
Are you kidding? They'd leave half the useful tools out and charge for the rest of the service on a per-use basis. Networked through AT&T. Thanks, but I think I'd rather write my own...
5 Kilos is about 10.1 pounds (2.2 lbs per Kilo approximately).
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
You we're so close.
The problem with humans isn't political greed, but just GREED. All self inflicted problems, going back to the allegorical apple in Eden, are a result of giving in to greed, taking more than one needs or deserves.
Just to be clear allegorically, we still live in Eden and are still picking those apples, and screwing ourselves every time. Eve is not a female human, but a psychological part of all humans, without regard to gender or sexual orientation.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
Like vietnam, like iraq.
US Army has tons of different gears and all of them much much better than Iraq Freedom Fighters. With all technological advances US Army can't defeat fighters who haven't got anything than slippers.
First of all a soldier need spirit to continue fight.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Did anyone mention David and Goliath? The dude in the cave with an Kalashnikov, a robe and sandals seems a bit more fit for that kind of environment than a Goliath-ish soldier with all this fancy technology. The sandal-man moves around more easily, knows the environment he's in, runs faster, makes less noise and so on. Mr. sandal might be pwnd badly the day Goliath starts using nano-technology, though.
But as we WoW players tend to say: Skill > gear! (to a certain degree, at least)
They probably just figured out how to attach their helmet to a hijacked phoneline and then surf the internet for porn on their HUD.
By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts. That's what won WWII, grunts. Although one might get the impression from watching some TV documentaries that are currently circulating that WWII was won on the beaches of Normandy by British and US soldiers, Normandy was simply the coup de grace. The offensive power of the German army was mostly broken at Kursk in July 1943 by Soviet soldiers who man for man were worse trained than the Germans and who drove T-34 tanks that were qualitatively and technologically inferior to state of the art German equipment. The quality didn't matter given the short life-spans of equipment in battle but the technological advantage did matter at first glance, the exchange ratio of tanks was approximately one German Panther or Tiger tank for three, four or in some situations even five or more Russian T-34 tanks. Unfortunately for the Germans the Russians had more than just five T-34s for each one German Tiger or Panther so having a superabundance of relatively lower tech eqipment mattered more than having much fewer numbers of much higher quality/tech and more expensive gear. The fate of Germany was largely sealed during the subsequent Soviet campaigns on the eastern front. It was Soviet Russians 'grunts' who deserve much of the credit for routing the Nazis although the magnitude and significance of their contribution is all to often either ignored or marginalized in the west. The power of 'Horde' mathematics should not be underestimated.
I don't think anybody seriously believes that China is likely to invade the USA any time soon so the most likely alternative scenario for a conflict is an out and out conventinal (as in non-nuclear) land war in on the Asian mainland and/or the Asia-Pacific region between the USA and China. Who do you think would win, assuming such a conflict can be 'won' in any conventional sense of that word? The Americans certainly have naval supremacy and the Chinese may not have stealth fighters (yet) so that gives the USA a major edge in any air war although this will be rectified within the next couple of decades at the latest by the Chinese gaining stealth capability. Chinese high tech war fighting capability is still evolving but having lots of 'grunts' and being willing ruthlessly throw them at the enemy with little regard for losses still counts for a lot. It has served China well in the past and this as recently as the Korean war of 1953.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Spend the money on education, health, transport, space exploration, helping other countries... but for fark sake, cut the budget for the military. There's people starving in Africa picking your coffee for you. People starving in Colombia, picking the coffee for you. Same goes for many other countries who America wants to defend itself from... mainly nations of little brown people who are tired of eating granies for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
It use to be that the military/industrial complex drove advancements. Now it's the consumer/industrial complex that does.
"You're also quite right about the warm water port. Looking at a map of the world at the time, it didn't take much imagination to see where they were headed. Their Navy was either frozen into or out of port half of the year - and that wasn't working for them."
Thankfully global warming will take care of the problem.
iGun
iRifle
iNuke
Sure you've got to turn that cold war up to luke warm every once in a while, but it's sure been a money-making concept.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Having the technology to keep our troops better informed, make sure they hit the right targets, and allow them to get back out safely, is all good. However, call my cynical, I strongly suspect that a lot of the backing for the war came from companies that wanted those lucrative DoD contracts that have been drying up since the Cold War ended. What better way to reinvigorate flagging weapon systems contracts than an active war? Before you call me a leftist commie, look at the makeup of the original Bush team. Rumsfeld and Cheney both have intimate ties to the companies that are making a mint off of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
... hmmm... weapons of mass destruction! That's just the ticket! How can anyone object to going to war over that? And hey, by the time they realize we were full of shit, it will all be over.
There are people who seriously believe that it is in our best interest to always have an active military campaign. The argument goes that is the only way we can have blooded troops and battlefield tested equipment ready for when we REALLY need it.
Of course, you could argue that it's immoral to start wars simply to train troops and test equipment. You have to have a better excuse... like
This is the kind of stuff that makes people hate the U.S., the cynical attitude that the only life that matters is an American life, and for that matter, only the lives of the rich fat cats sitting at home pulling the strings. Thousands of Americans have dies. Tens of thousands of Americans have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families have paid for this war with losses of their own. (How often do you see Fox News talk about that?)
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
When this first popped up on slashdot many months ago I pointed out that soldiers are always reluctant to accept new equipment. Everyone started telling me that I was wrong...I now say BITE ME! thanks you
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
If you are criticizing the comment on Christians who don't act like Christ, please be aware that it's directed at a group of religious adherents and not a race. Furthermore, he was mainly concerned with India's colonial masters who self identifies as Anglican Christians. Do you think Christ would support colonialism?
If you think we are possessed of a well-lubricated military machine, then you haven't been paying attention.
Didn't you watch "M.A.S.H."?
Those guys were totally lubricated.
You try carrying an extra 10 kg of equipment on top of the 70 kg you carry - weapon (60 year old design), ammo, etc - and see how effective that will make you in 130 F weather.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There are lots of "small" skirmishes and wars going on each year. Still. Maybe it just isn't being called World War III because enough alliances haven't been created yet...
No matter what they end up paying for the system, the guy wearing it is going to be killed by someone eating rice or falafel who cost all of $200 to train and equip.
War itself is a simplistic solution to complex problems it was never really meant to solve.
Simplistic premises and analogies don't help much either.
What kind of kill ratio do you need for an even trade-off, 1000:1?
There's more to it than numbers. Minds must be changed, specifically those who have the power to wage war which includes leaders, but also terror cells as small as one wacko with a bomb. In the end it's the willingness to fight that must be neutralized.
I think that was the real difference between the "missions accomplished" 62 years ago and the current unpleasantness.
And whoever said it was an apple? Let's not give the pseudo-scientific-Christ-hating crowd any more rope to try to hang us with.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
With regard to "we're" and "were", all I have to say is "Oops, mistakes happen when editing sometimes, and "we're" is a contraction of "we are", not concatenation."
With regard to the remainder of your reply, when I hit Submit I expected that any reply at all would be a troll or flame. Instead, I received an intelligent and mostly polite reply.
Yes, Adam and Eve were real people, but the story about them and Eden is allegorical, as is the one about Abel and Cain, again about real people. These story events are repeated again and again and again throughout the history of our species/civilization. I keep the discussion somewhat abstract to avoid the idiots who think that women are responsible for all problems, the "If Eve hadn't done that we would all be sitting pretty." crowd of literal interpreters, who then somehow forget about Cain.
As for the "pseudo-scientific-Christ-hating crowd", all we can do is be good witnesses of how the Universe works. They will flame away, somehow thinking that the Universe was created from nothing, that there is no higher power than humanity while believing in parallel universes and god like extraterrestrial beings. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, both real places, then becomes relevant
."What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Sorry, scratch that last line.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
"And of course, everybody has to be plugged into the system in order for it to be worth a damn. At the end of an exhausting night's worth of house-to-house searches, Lieutenant Michael Bennett loses track of half of his platoon. They aren't very far away -- just a few blocks. But because no one is up on Land Warrior, it takes an hour of bleary-eyed scrambling for the platoon to be reunited." -Noah Shachtman-
If the "digital chem light" feature is so popular, it should be simplified and integrated with a basic grunt locator system. Grunts in the field should have a cell phone sized [think moto razr] device that integrates into the LW system to transmit their position and basic messages back to their team leader. Think of those ipod controls you see integrated into clothing like ski/snowboard parkas. Keep it simple, light weight and easy to understand. A system like this could easily be used to relay messages such as "building clear", "hostiles sighted", "taking fire", "reinforcements required", "medic", etc. back to their team leader.
No offense was meant or taken.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler