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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."
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.
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
You're right that it's custom hardware and software, and thus more expensive simply because there's not the economy of scale like in mass produced goods.
/. about Land Warrior) always echo in my head: "Get a bullet in a paper map, and you have a map with a hole in it. Get a bullet in your whizbang electronic map, you have a paper weight."
That said. Your GPS iPaq counter example struck me as ironic, as that's exactly what the prototype was. (Hell, that's what the prototype has been for Blue Force Tracking for years now.)
Since the Army felt comfortable with field testing an iPaq in a combat zone, I suspect the deployed system isn't going to be that much different
The geek in me loves the idea of tracking everyone one on the battlefield on and sending encrypted coordinates back and forth and everything. Wearable computing. Augmented reality. It's all good in da hood baby. But at the same time, whenever I read about Land Warrior, these words (which I believe was actually posted many years ago here on