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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."
It's not a new idea. When the Germans were making their last big push into Russia near the end of WWII, they brought forward their newest toughest tanks; near indestructable even to the venerable T-34's that were winning the war for the Soviets.
You know how the russian soldiers defeated them? They poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. They didn't have any anti-tank weapons that were effective, but the gas did the trick fine.
It's easy to get sucked in by wanting the "best" but the best is expensive, and expensive is always in short supply. Get functional and available first, before you try the sexy crap.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.