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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.
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.
The Iraqis run around with just guns and walky talkys, and they seem to be doing just fine...
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
You know, I just looked it up, and it appears that this guy weighs in 300 pounds. Is it any wonder that the nerds identify with the character?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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
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
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.
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.
To be honest, I'm not sure it was wrong for them to discount engineers whose relevant experience was playing Quake or something, and only wanting to hear from the guys who crawl around in real mud with real rifles.
Which means the weren't going to do ANY improvements until the entire system was complete, and they could hand the working thing over.
And how is this different from various iterative software engineering methodologies that are promoted around here? Get a minimal version to a real customer as fast as possible to get real feedback. Don't waste time letting non-customers guess at what customers really want or need, find out from customers what they need.
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.
Attack >
Defend >
Settings >
Shuffle Tactics >
Helmet Light >
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
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?