Thoughts on future soldiers

[Rett Mikhal]

We've all seen the overused and rather unrealistic space marine, which is usually a guy in a bulky suit four times bigger than he is.

I don't think this vision is practical at all. Space marines don't have to fight in the vacuum of space (and Newton's 2nd Law would make that extremely difficult regardless), so why are they in bulky space suits? You could argue it's for protection from other planets and their atmospheres.

Anyway, that stuff is too far ahead to predict accurately. I'm more interested in the not-too-distant future. Topics of interest might include:

Genetic Engineering. Will we eventually cave and breed super-soldiers? What would we do with them when the war was over?

Nanotechnology. Could it ever advance to the point it could be used in armor and weapons systems effectively? For armor we're talking about something that instantly reacts and changes composition when it is impacted, so it is light when not under fire and impenetrable when struck. For weapons, the possibilities are really endless.

Robotics. Would we really ever trust an artificial soldier with a weapon? To clarify this is assuming the human element is removed, as we have robot soldiers now but they are entirely remote controlled (or at least the moment of firing is under the control of a human).

Camouflage. Is an active camouflage suit really feasible? At the very least, active camouflage for large objects such as vehicles or buildings.

Auto targeting. Think of the Predator's shoulder cannon. Will target recognition systems become advanced enough to completely trust and automate? This is different from the robotics as they would be carried by soldiers and programmed for specific tasks without artificial intelligence.

Completely Unmanned Aerial Warfare. We're at the decision point that any more advances in aircraft engines would become detrimental to the pilot's health when performing maneuvers. Soon, even landing and taking off will require extreme G-forces and then it's a small matter of time before cruising speeds become too extreme for humans to endure. While metals and composites can always be made better, humans cannot. The idea of remote control fighter planes is extremely risky, though. A momentary glitch could cost billions, and the risk of remote hijacking is ever present. While you could argue the fighters would have the most advanced anti-hacking systems in the world, I would argue all technology advances at the same rate. Get the best shield in place and the best spear will be invented momentarily. So, will it ever happen? Perhaps dogfighting is, for the 100th time, officially obsolete.

Future infantry weapons. Hiram Maxim's principle can only take so many more improvements before it reaches the zenith. There have been attempts to make better weapons, both lethal and non-lethal. There's three options for changing firearms. Change the round or change the firing method, or change both. An example of changing the round would be caseless ammunition which removes the need for firearms to recycle the action and eject the cartridge. Example of changing the firing method would be that rather bizarre but strangely attractive idea of the centrifuge weapon, The Dread. Example of changing both would be a kinetic energy weapon, such as a concentrated heat beam (exists, but bulky) or directed energy weapon (also exists, but even bulkier).

Communication. What is the ideal communication system of the future for warfare and logistics?

Finally, the individual soldier. How much of this technology will be integrated into the common soldier's equipment? They can't carry everything... or can they?

So what are your thoughts or ideas? Feel free to throw out any ideas you've heard or had. Don't be shy, now.

 

[Mistral]

Reactive armor is probably doable, based on the same theories as they use in Chobham tank armor. That or a "weave" armor that strengthens the more you apply pressure. I think rather than genetic engineering, drugs may be important. Smart suits capable of monitoring the soldier's health and administering proper drug treatment to wounded areas of the body may line the reactive armor. A HUD for accepting UAV downloads and translating them into realtime battlefield information is doable now, more or less.
Compressed ceramic projectiles designed to fly apart(like a MIRV missile) may be the ammo of the future. Light-adaptive skins on the reactive armor would render wearers barely visible in anything other than strong light. Micro-processors would "look" at the 360 degree surroundings of the wearer, adjust the tone of the skin via spectroscopic analysis, and the same tech that allows the creation of "roll-up" computer screens would handle the actual coloration/patterns of camouflage.

 

[Caliburn24]

I did a hitch as a Cavalry Scout in the US Army, did my 15 months in Iraq kicking in doors, patrolling villages and got my Combat Action Badge somewhere along the line. So I have field experience with all the latest "fielded" equipment that the US Army uses. I've also kept up with much of the information put out about the Landwarrior and Future Warrior systems the Army is working on. And I had some friends doing testing out at White Sands on some prototype stuff, but unfortunately that stuff is mostly classified.

The three most notable trends in US soldiers' personal kit that I believe are a change from the past are:

1) Interceptor Body Armor(IBA). Every soldier in the US Army has it now, and it is being continually tweaked and modified. The Small Arms Protective Inserts(SAPI) and Enhanced SAPI plates are rated to stop 7.62mm standard rounds, and I know several guys who owe their lives to those plates.

Body armor is nothing new of course, but issuing it to EVERYONE, and the level of protection of the IBA is definitely new. Other armies, have taken notice and the trend for armies that can afford it is to get body armor. I even saw fair numbers of Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers in body armor. Technology is continually improving body armor, and just last week in the Army Times it was announced that the Army is going to start using a liquid to soak the inner kevlar pads of our IBAs with a substance that increases protection.

2) On the left side of every IBA(at least in my regiment) is a medical kit. And that kit includes the latest in Chitosan bandages and QuikClot powders and stuff that can stop blood loss much more rapidly than ever before. And perhaps more importantly every soldier is taught how to use that kit, it is part of the core skills that are taught over and over again. When your buddy goes down with a rifle wound to the chest you call for a medic, but even as you're yelling you're breaking out your own kit and doing what you need to do. Every soldier is now to some degree a medic, and the increase in our wounded soldiers surviving hits that would have killed them in earlier wars is largely due to immediate medical attention.

3) Close Combat Optics. Scopes until recently were for long range combat only, but a few years ago it was realized that if you put a bright dot in a 3x-4x scope it can work at close range with both eyes open. Hence the development of the Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight(ACOG) that I had on my M4, and probably the single best combat improvement in soldier personal gear in who knows how long. It works in dark or light, has no electronics to break, helps rapid close shooting as well as long range shooting and is rugged enough to keep its zero under almost any conditions. The increase in accuracy at all ranges is substantial.

The US Army now puts Close Combat Optics on all our rifles, and many rifles in development have built in optics. Every army that can afford it is doing the same thing.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Looking at the 25-50 years from now range:

* Computerized Composite Sensors -

Traditional troop-level sensors only allow you to use one at a time, and eliminate or obscure normal vision unless you either switch back and forth from looking through your optics to looking with your eyes alone, or use a sight mounted over only one eye. By linking multiple forms of sensors through a wearable computer programmed to filter out extraneous data and only present that which is most useful to the soldier (or specifically asked for) at any given time through a helmet-mounted HUD, it can greatly enhance the soldier's situational awareness. It can also allow feeds from heavier vehicle-mounted sensors and UAVs to be piped into the soldiers helmet display, and when used in combination with encrypted GPS/ID beacons on all allied soldiers, vehicles, and structures could display the location and status of all friendly forces in the area and prevent blue-on-blue fire.

Picture it like a clear flip-up visor covering the entire face and peripherals, similar to what riot police wear but with data projected on the inside like an aircraft's HUD. As you enter a hostile town, all of the following could be represented in CGI facsimiles of real sensor data projected over specific items while you're also still seeing everything else with your normal vision:

- RADAR could place brackets and IDs over blue force aircraft and vehicles, alerting you to nearby fire support and where not to shoot to avoid friendly casualties. It could paint a 3-D image of the town you are entering to give you an idea of potential upcoming ambush points or the distance from your objective.
- Infrared thermographs could detect idling or recently used vehicle engines, firing or recently fired weapons, threats concealed behind porous obstacles like smoke, dust, or brush, whether a body lying in the road is dead or alive (only useful if the body has been dead long enough to cool though), etc.
- A combination of terahertz radiation, ultrasound, RADAR, and other sensors could give an X-Ray-like view through structures and vehicles, underground or under cover to detect mines/IEDs/bunkers, or through clothes to see if a civilian or POW is carrying concealed weapons or suicide vests.
- Ultraviolet sensors could detect reflections off of windows, enemy optics, metal surfaces of vehicles, and eyeglasses.
- Light intensifiers could illuminate the view at night, a dark room or alley or shadows, detect friendly or enemy lasers being sighted, and intensify and mark reflections and muzzle flashes from enemy weapons.
- Sound amplifiers on multiple soldiers and vehicle could intensify and triangulate the position of friendly and enemy fire, vehicles, or voices and identify it by its sound signature. It could translate enemy or allied (non-English) speech. It could detect a sniper's position. It could project threat keywords or entire translations onto the HUD or play them in your ear. If a POW says "bomb" or "gun" or "Allahu Akbar" or "ready" or "fire" or any number of other keywords it could alert you to a potential threat and where it's coming from in time to try to avoid or prevent it.
- Multipurpose free-electron LASERS could be used for target designation from a helmet or gun-mounted laser, range-finding, line-of-sight communications, LIDAR, electronic tripwires, motion detectors, and to listen in on enemy conversations in structures by bouncing the laser off of windows and translating the vibrations into understandable sounds.
- Every soldier in your or an attached units GPS location, ID, and status could be projected onto the screen, including data from medical sensors on their bodies to see if they are wounded or dead and ammunition remaining and weapon's operational status from RFID tags on their weapons and gear. You can communicate with any individual, entire groups, air and fire support, and base at will depending on your authorization level. You can show other soldiers in your unit an impromptu battle plan by writing with a finger stylus on a wrist-mounted touchscreen with all the same data.
- Digital helmet and gun cameras tied into the computer record all data to make it easier to determine what happened when making incident reports, to determine bomb or weapons damage assessments or who hit what, so your CO can see what you're seeing at will, for reconnaissance purposes (combined with sensor data), and to take personal videos and pics.
- Radio and other electronic homing and detection sensors can triangulate, translate, and decrypt enemy transmissions via radio, cellphones, and satphones, and can pick up the location of hostile RADAR sites or RADAR guided weapons.

Most importantly, during frequent downtime the combat computer and visor can be interlinked with the soldier's own personal entertainment, communications, and computing device(s) to play music, watch TV and movies, play games, take pictures or video with the helmet mounted camera (when permitted), connect to the internet (when permitted), and make satellite calls to friends and loved ones (when permitted) complete with internal (shows face) and external webcams.

* Exo-Skeletons and Support Arms -

These allow for the carrying of heavier loads by certain soldiers and weapons/ammo that could normally only be vehicle mounted. Picture soldiers being able to carry future versions of .50 cal machine guns, Mk-19 grenade launchers, Miniguns (for those who don't have Jesse "The Body" Ventura strength), missile launchers, energy weapons, and other heavy weapons on a support arm (much like Vasquez's and Drake's smartgun support arms in 'Aliens') and harness which distributes the weight and the dampens the recoil evenly over the whole body and the exo-skeleton. They could carry a backpack vertical launch missile system for dealing with aircraft, armor, vehicles, and structures. They could have a backpack mounted movable mortar or recoilless cannon tied to sensors and a laser designator for more accurate forward supporting fire.

The support arm could also assist by auto-targeting a potential threat until the operator pulls the trigger or decides not to fire, by making sure every soldier in the unit chooses a different target to prevent overkill or missing of certain targets, by preventing recoil from moving the weapon off-target, and by leaving the gun in a ready position even if the soldier relaxes his arm.

It could allow for longer operational time by lightening the load on the wearer while actually carrying heavier loads itself, bringing more supplies into battle or on patrol; carrying better environmental, N/B/C protection, and heating/cooling systems, and for providing the soldier with an extra layer of heavier external armor over their regular body armor. It could increase the soldier's speed, stamina, strength, and steadiness during combat by dampening recoil and shaking from adrenaline and nervousness. Pneumatic jacks in the legs could assist in leaping large obstacles, possibly coupled with grappling guns or short range rocket/jet assist packs.

The system would have to be designed to be easy to break away in case of it being disabled. Small outward firing explosive bolts could act as a backup if normal dismounting systems fail. The suit should be easy to step off or to fall away. These are also bulky systems so they're not ideal for all missions and environments, so they might only be used by certain individuals per unit or not taken on all missions.

* Small Unit Robotic Assets -

UAVS, drones, and other robots should become so unbiquitous that you can have them in varying degrees from the company down to the fire team level. These should have limited AI abilities that can choose targets but still require a human operator to make the final decision on whether to fire or not.

Every company should have its own on-demand reconnassaince assets and air/artillary support in the form of an armed UAV and UGV (unmanned ground vehicle). The UAVs would assist with over-the-horizon communications if satellite comms were out, monitor and guard the area of operations, provide multispectral imagery of the entire battlefield, and could attack air and ground targets in support of that company's troops. Likewise, ground vehicles could dismantle or detroy mines, IEDs, structures, and armor too dangerous for soldiers to approach; could patrol a perimeter, scout out a potential path or building for ambushes and enemy positions, retrieve/treat/evacuate wounded soldiers with manipulator arms, push disabled vehicles out of the way or demolish obstacles, carry heavy loads and weapons, dig trenches and foxholes, build obstacles, provide low-range artillery fire, monitor and guide POWs or civilians to safe areas, shoot enemy soldiers, cross rivers, etc.

Individual squads or fire teams should have a smaller "Mule" which carries heavy weapons and equipment along with them, or can carry out a wounded comrade. This should be small enough to fit through doorways and climb up stairs or over obstacles for urban combat, and will hopefully be a lot quieter and less bouncy than the current versions under development. Each team should also have a VTOL micro-UAV launched from a shoulder mount which can check around corners, in buildings, and in areas outside line-of-sight.

* Non-Lethal and Defensive Systems -

As policing actions following a war and peacekeeping operations become even more commonplace, non-lethal methods of eliminating threats become that much more important.

- Laser tasers are an improvement over conventional tasers by eliminating the darts and wire and instead have the electricity travel along a path established by a laser beam to the target. This gives greater range, faster reuse and response times, the ability to track the target if you miss the first time, and no danger of the darts not hooking onto or being knocked off the target.

- Kevlar (or other material) airbag barriers can be set up at checkpoints, on structures, or on the front and sides of vehicles to be triggered or automatically (tied to sensors) rapidly inflate in case of detonation of a IED/mine, approach of a potential suicide bomber or car bomb, or sniper fire. It won't stop the explosive effects completely or if they're too close for it to react in time, but can dampen them, and if used on an incoming vehicle could quickly slow it to a halt.

- Stop strips combine conventional spike strips with vertical firing EMPs to disable newer cars and explosively fired rapid hardening foam and/or wire to entangle wheels/axles and stop-up engines on older cars.

- Mine/IED dampening boots have suspension mounted steel, titanium, or ceramic (for lighter weight) inserts underneath the foot and angled channels that dissipate the explosive force outward from the feet and legs. Coupled with lightweight armor on and between the legs this could greatly reduce loss of limbs from explosives.

- Rapid hardening but air porous capture foam can be fired from a sprayer at a running person to subdue them, or fired by large grenade or injected by a drill/gun to rapidly expand and fill a room and prevent those inside from moving until they can be safely extracted.

- Energy based non-lethal systems can induce nausea or pain on crowds or individuals until they retreat or surrender.

- PsyOps freestanding holographic displays spray an area with reflective particles designed to hang in the air as long as possible and then project a three-dimensional image into that cloud, whether it be messages or images designed to win over or frighten the populace and enemy soldiers, or to fool them into thinking your forces are larger or somewhere they're not.

* Containerized Base System -

An entire rapid deployment force's initial base should be able to be transported to the theater of operations in standard ISO containers which can be carried on one heavy container ship, or in planes, beneath helicopters, on trains, on trucks, or in landing craft in order to set up operations as quickly as possible in as many different ways as possible. Everything from barracks, command posts, mess halls, field hospitals, PXs, showers and toilets, runway or landing pad segments, defensive barriers, anti-aircraft weapons, sensors and comms equipment, walls/gates/towers, fixed artillery, supplies, fuel, energy systems, etc. should be container based, linkable, and ready to work immediately upon reaching its location.

* Advanced Ammunition and Missiles -

- Steerable bullets. Larger-sized (.50 cal or above) laser guided bullets with a moveable nosecone and pop-out fins that can adjust it's heading in flight to a limited degree to hit laser designated targets.

- Electrically fired flechette wide-area weapon. Much like the weapon in 'Black Sunday,' this fires thousands of tiny titanium, tungsten, or depleted uranium armor piercing darts to take out a wide area rather than one target. Figure if you're on patrol in the jungle and encounter an approaching enemy force that's spread out, you can rapidly fire a burst of this to hit an area of say 50 feet wide by 8 feet high that has a good chance of at least wounding most of them. Tied to sensors, a system that subtly moves each firing tube on the gun, and a helmet display, you could tailor the kill box to fit over all the enemy troops perfectly to guarantee maximum effectiveness. With no propellent or magazines needed, each launch tube can contain several subsequent rounds to fire.

- Multi-Purpose Missiles. Combines a depleted uranium or tungsten kinetic energy penetrator at the front either behind or within the primary sensor with a high explosive round behind the KEP to allow it to be used against armor, light vehicles, structures, or planes with equal effectiveness. Combines micro-sized RADAR, IR, UV, radio homing, sound, proximity, and LASER sensor systems with steerable/trackable nosecones, fins, and vectored thrust for maximum steerability. Not as effective as specialized missiles, but they allow for greater versatility in units that face varied threats.


All of this will obviously cost an incredible amount of money, so it would either have to be in limited use with specialized units or our still Cold War geared military will have to adjust from thinking in terms of massive amounts of expensive vessels and planes designed to take on enemies who use even more massive amounts of vessels and planes to making the smaller infantry units who do the bulk of the dirty work into a more effective fighting force capable of handling many of those larger tasks on their own.

 

[Caliburn24]

The problem with all that stuff, aside from the cost, is that it is freaking heavy. Exo-frames that allow a soldier to carry more gear are not practical until they find a lightweight, durable and stable power source. And if such a power source is found, it'll change the nature of vehicle design at the same time.

Until that happens we're left with just what your average grunt can carry by himself. And that load is becoming more and more ridiculous. My standard "battle rattle" in Iraq of just my weapon, combat load of ammunition, body armor, helmet and camel-back weighed around 60 pounds. Add in stuff like grenades, radio, GPS, more water, MREs, just enough for a day or two of operations and we're talking well above 80 pounds. If you want me to go into the field independent of vehicle support for more than a day or two we're talking well over 100 pounds of kit.

The Mule you mentioned would alleviate that, but for all the cool propaganda and videos about it, it is still in essence a vehicle, and can not go everywhere pure infantry can go, nor can be it as sneaky.

There is a growing sentiment in infantry circles that we're carrying too much and growing too immobile. We need to lighten that load.

 

[gturner]

^ You apprently weren't using a large bundle of helium balloons to ease the load, which is the simple, low-tech alternative to anti-grav suits and inertial dampeners.

Some armchair analysts argue that an over reliance on helium balloons could imperile a unit's mobility if we fight an enemy clever enough to shoot out the balloons - or cut their strings with chain shot. The latter would typically occur at the opening of an engagement, in common parlance "when the balloon goes up."

Others have pointed to the difficulties in integrating balloon assisted infantry with helicopters, though perhaps these issues can be overcome with more training.

Rest assured, though. Top minds are working on the problem.

 

[captcalhoun]

ceramite plate armour, bolt guns, gene-boosted strength, telepathic link to the armour...

 

[Sephiroth]

for what's on the board in the near future, more of the same, I expect those satellite uplinked armor kits to be in regular field use before too long, and I saw a thread elsewhere that a portable scout drone is being developed, but short of the development of a more efficient portable power source toys like that are gonna be severely limited

 

[clint g]

Aside from the stuff Caliburn mentioned, the other big field of development is in communications and information technology. It is very likely that in the next 10 to 15 years the people in charge will be able to pinpoint where each soldier is on the battlefield.

 

[Caliburn24]

One thing that is doable today, but politically unfeasible would be implanting GPS chips and possibly medical sensors under the skin of soldiers to track their locations and status.

Soldiers by and large are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea, but eventually some government will have the gall to do it.

And I'm sure some Special Forces units already do it.

 

[gturner]

Aside from the stuff Caliburn mentioned, the other big field of development is in communications and information technology. It is very likely that in the next 10 to 15 years the people in charge will be able to pinpoint where each soldier is on the battlefield.

That's where we can be undone by our hubris. In WW-II the Nazis refused to believe that anyone, especially non-Aryans, could be smart enough to break German encryptions. As a result, the allies often had better knowledge of German positions than the German general staff did, as we were processing the messages and reacting faster than they were. But we were clever about using the information taken from intercepts and the Germans surrendered without ever even suspecting that we'd broken all their codes.

If we create too much raw real time information and float it out into the ether, it may take us a very long time to accept that the enemy has tapped into the stream with a direct feed, especially if they're very smart about it, as we were in WW-II.

Take as one obvious example. Suppose some future version of that strange gay intelligence analyst, instead of sending incredible volumes of classified documents to WikiLeaks, rigs up a back-door to allow the Chinese or Soviets access to our real-time tactical information, after it's been decrypted. It could even be as simple as rerouting video feeds and adding video monitor splitter cables, something that could take forever to detect amongst a pile of ad-hoc cables strung through a command HQ.

A few months of feverish enemy hacking and coding later, your helmet mounted HUD displays mostly phantom targets while the Chinese or Russian HUDs display not only your exact position, view, and actions, but also your girlfriend's Facebook page. Three years after your five year stint in a POW camp you find out that our entire army was pwned by some pimply faced Chinese hacker.

 

[MANT!]

One thing that is doable today, but politically unfeasible would be implanting GPS chips and possibly medical sensors under the skin of soldiers to track their locations and status.

Soldiers by and large are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea, but eventually some government will have the gall to do it.

And I'm sure some Special Forces units already do it.

one could put GPS chips in the helmets..

I remember the old 1980s future combat soldier which looked amazingly like the following..US Army 2030CE concept

except for the color (it was green not tan.) and some minor helmet details..

Ohh and the 1980s one included a 1 shot backpack mortar and a 1 shot backpack anti-helicopter missile

 

[STR]

Aside from the stuff Caliburn mentioned, the other big field of development is in communications and information technology. It is very likely that in the next 10 to 15 years the people in charge will be able to pinpoint where each soldier is on the battlefield.

That's where we can be undone by our hubris. In WW-II the Nazis refused to believe that anyone, especially non-Aryans, could be smart enough to break German encryptions. As a result, the allies often had better knowledge of German positions than the German general staff did, as we were processing the messages and reacting faster than they were. But we were clever about using the information taken from intercepts and the Germans surrendered without ever even suspecting that we'd broken all their codes.

If we create too much raw real time information and float it out into the ether, it may take us a very long time to accept that the enemy has tapped into the stream with a direct feed, especially if they're very smart about it, as we were in WW-II.

Take as one obvious example. Suppose some future version of that strange gay intelligence analyst, instead of sending incredible volumes of classified documents to WikiLeaks, rigs up a back-door to allow the Chinese or Soviets access to our real-time tactical information, after it's been decrypted. It could even be as simple as rerouting video feeds and adding video monitor splitter cables, something that could take forever to detect amongst a pile of ad-hoc cables strung through a command HQ.

A few months of feverish enemy hacking and coding later, your helmet mounted HUD displays mostly phantom targets while the Chinese or Russian HUDs display not only your exact position, view, and actions, but also your girlfriend's Facebook page. Three years after your five year stint in a POW camp you find out that our entire army was pwned by some pimply faced Chinese hacker.

It WAS hubris to think that Enigma was unbreakable. However, even with all the computing resources of Google, it would take over 1,000 years to crack modern encryption. So it's not that anyone thinks this stuff is unbreakable, it's just that there's a 99.999999999% probability everyone involved in the battle will have died of old age decades if not centuries before it's cracked. It is the hardest target on the battlefield, so your better bet is putting resources into something softer, like tanks and stealth aircraft. You at least have a possibility of knocking one of those out.

There is a growing sentiment in infantry circles that we're carrying too much and growing too immobile. We need to lighten that load.

A lot of that is temporary. As the electronics gets smaller and smarter, I'd expect everything to be lumped into a single, lightweight unit with a couple of backup batteries. I'd go with the other people, and stick it in the helmet, but allow it to be removable so you can access its info outside of combat. Body armor will reach a point where you can either bulk it up to proof it against 50 caliber, or slim it down and still keep 30 cal rating.

In the meanwhile, we may see a return to the concept of light and heavy infantry.

 

[gturner]

It WAS hubris to think that Enigma was unbreakable. However, even with all the computing resources of Google, it would take over 1,000 years to crack modern encryption. So it's not that anyone thinks this stuff is unbreakable, it's just that there's a 99.999999999% probability everyone involved in the battle will have died of old age decades if not centuries before it's cracked. It is the hardest target on the battlefield, so your better bet is putting resources into something softer, like tanks and stealth aircraft. You at least have a possibility of knocking one of those out.

And that's the hubris I was talking about.

You immediately assumed that the codes are unbreakable, the hardest target on the battlefield, without worrying over even the obvious potential security holes, like the enemy having a tap into your decrypted information, a spy cam on the ceiling watching all of your 200 video feeds, some Russian having the password to access the whole system, and some random nutcase dumping everything onto his iPhone8, encrypting it, and streaming it to the Chinese.

Plus, there's the problem that the more data we transmit the tinier the statistical flaws that might show up. Battle orders and documents are always rather short, but live streaming video from a million devices on the battlefield is a pretty large sample size. Then there's the problem of putting transmitters, otherwise known as beacons, on soldiers and keeping them turned on all the time. In the Korean war both we and the enemy could even detect and locate receivers (they leaked at 455 kHz).

And of course another potential problem is that we might be moving the sensory overload from command level down to the field level. If texting while driving is worse than driving drunk, and talking on a cell phone isn't much better, how bad is texting and talking in a sniper alley?

Ignoring such potential flaws is how we could easily get pwned.

 

[clint g]

Aside from the stuff Caliburn mentioned, the other big field of development is in communications and information technology. It is very likely that in the next 10 to 15 years the people in charge will be able to pinpoint where each soldier is on the battlefield.

That's where we can be undone by our hubris. In WW-II the Nazis refused to believe that anyone, especially non-Aryans, could be smart enough to break German encryptions. As a result, the allies often had better knowledge of German positions than the German general staff did, as we were processing the messages and reacting faster than they were. But we were clever about using the information taken from intercepts and the Germans surrendered without ever even suspecting that we'd broken all their codes.

If we create too much raw real time information and float it out into the ether, it may take us a very long time to accept that the enemy has tapped into the stream with a direct feed, especially if they're very smart about it, as we were in WW-II.

Take as one obvious example. Suppose some future version of that strange gay intelligence analyst, instead of sending incredible volumes of classified documents to WikiLeaks, rigs up a back-door to allow the Chinese or Soviets access to our real-time tactical information, after it's been decrypted. It could even be as simple as rerouting video feeds and adding video monitor splitter cables, something that could take forever to detect amongst a pile of ad-hoc cables strung through a command HQ.

A few months of feverish enemy hacking and coding later, your helmet mounted HUD displays mostly phantom targets while the Chinese or Russian HUDs display not only your exact position, view, and actions, but also your girlfriend's Facebook page. Three years after your five year stint in a POW camp you find out that our entire army was pwned by some pimply faced Chinese hacker.

Well, considering how the modern military is operated, we're already past that point. We can either pull back in fear or try to embrace it while staying ahead of the game.

That being said, another area where I think we will se major development is in ballistic helmets. Right now we don't have 7.62 resistant head gear. We've been working that problem though and I think we will see it sooner rather than later.

 

[STR]

It WAS hubris to think that Enigma was unbreakable. However, even with all the computing resources of Google, it would take over 1,000 years to crack modern encryption. So it's not that anyone thinks this stuff is unbreakable, it's just that there's a 99.999999999% probability everyone involved in the battle will have died of old age decades if not centuries before it's cracked. It is the hardest target on the battlefield, so your better bet is putting resources into something softer, like tanks and stealth aircraft. You at least have a possibility of knocking one of those out.

And that's the hubris I was talking about.

You immediately assumed that the codes are unbreakable, the hardest target on the battlefield, without worrying over even the obvious potential security holes, like the enemy having a tap into your decrypted information, a spy cam on the ceiling watching all of your 200 video feeds, some Russian having the password to access the whole system, and some random nutcase dumping everything onto his iPhone8, encrypting it, and streaming it to the Chinese.

Umm...I'm reluctant to even reply here because what you threw up here has absolutely nothing to do with what you said earlier. If you have a network that allows you to offload data onto unsecured storage devices, like an iPod, then it's just a s####y network policy. IT security goes far beyond passwords. It must include a good job of screening the people that have access to the info, and automating it to keep the involved individuals to an absolute minimum. Until it gets to those people, you keep it under end-to-end encryption.

Also, it is not an "assumption" that a 256-bit encrypted data stream is the hardest target on a battlefield. That's a mathematical fact. The odds of you breaking in your lifetime is trillions of times less likely than the odds of you blowing up a tank with a pistol with a single round left in the clip.

Seriously, the number of possible combinations in a 256-bit key is larger than the width of the observable universe in millimeters.

 

[gturner]

Umm...I'm reluctant to even reply here because what you threw up here has absolutely nothing to do with what you said earlier. If you have a network that allows you to offload data onto unsecured storage devices, like an iPod, then it's just a s####y network policy. IT security goes far beyond passwords. It must include a good job of screening the people that have access to the info, and automating it to keep the involved individuals to an absolute minimum. Until it gets to those people, you keep it under end-to-end encryption.

I'm still seeing the hubris...

We're talking about putting all this massive stream of data into the field. When a headquarters gets overrun does the Chinese raiding party wait until the IT and network people are done purging the drives before shooting them?

If you don't think this kind of thing happens, in the Eastern Front German generals often finished the still warm dinners of Russian generals after seizing their headquarters. In those days all taking a headquarters did was get you some maps and paper files that had little if any practical benefit. The radios were always wide open anyway, and you couldn't even meddle because orders and communications were verbally exchanged between people who had met each other.

In the future if a headquarters is overrun, it'll still be streaming the live feeds from all the soldiers, along with cute little icons highlighting their exact positions in real time. All the enemy has to do is occassionally play a recorded voice saying "Wait one."

Also, it is not an "assumption" that a 256-bit encrypted data stream is the hardest target on a battlefield. That's a mathematical fact. The odds of you breaking in your lifetime is trillions of times less likely than the odds of you blowing up a tank with a pistol with a single round left in the clip.

Seriously, the number of possible combinations in a 256-bit key is larger than the width of the observable universe in millimeters.

That's why the enemy will make sure to stay on your key distribution list so they don't waste resources. While we're on the topic, do you know why modern Air Force fighter communications are still conducted in the clear, in AM? Clue: It has something to do with jamming.

 

[gturner]

Here are some further problems and issues:

The assumption of network and data security ranks right up there with the assumption of French invincibility due to their elan, the assumption that the Maginot line was unbreachable (the Germans just drove around it, knowing it was tough because their contractors underbid the French and actually built large sections of it), and of course the Nazi assumptions that nobody could be reading their messages. I say this because network breaches and Pentagon shutdowns due to Chinese or Russian hackers has become so common that it no longer even rates as a news story.

Of course any data we gather will eventually escape our control. It's been what, two or three weeks since tens of thousands of top secret Pentagon files got blasted all over the Internet? All that took was one gay guy upset over a lover. But the encryption was 256 bit!

As an aside, my friend who's got a math degree and works at UCSF kept his journal encrypted with something like 2000+ bits. It took me only a couple hours to crack it because his algorithm was junk.

On a related note, we know our codes are unbreakable because American kids who passed remedial college algebra are of course way smarter at math than Russian and Asian kids.

This brings me to another point. Why are we so keen to generate teraquads of information that is largely useless to us but incredibly valuable to any enemy? Does anyone actually care what Sgt. Apone is seeing? Does Sgt. Apone even care? It really doesn't matter, because by the time he saw it the comms went down, leaving things an even more confused mess than it would've been if they didn't have the fancy gadgets in the first place.

99+% of the high-bit rate information generated by our soldiers will be of no practical use to them, their commanders, or us. But with clever editing and a good soundtrack it will cost us wars. For example, our soldiers gained the ability to record, store, and transmit image data. The result was Abu Ghraib, one of the largest setbacks in the Iraq War.

Can anyone point to the benefits of a commander always knowing exactly where his troops are, above knowing the area where they are? The troops and commander only need to broadcast their positions if they're going to call in fire support, but if they need fire support they'll just go ahead and call it in. The rest of the time their positional information is only useful to people trying to kill them.

So why generate, collect, and disseminate information that we don't care about and desperately want to keep from our enemies? If we didn't generate it in the first place then the enemy would have to do their own freakin' recon. Surely the enemy isn't going to be nice enough to collect real-time information on their own positions, disposition, and status and wrap it up in a nice bow for us, so why are we wanting to do the same for them?

It's enough that our commanders have a good idea where our troops are, or at least how long it will take them to move into action in a certain area. It forms a chain both up and down, with no potential security breech leaving everyone in the entire army standing where an artillery shell or missile is about to land.

To intimidate the enemy our soldiers should be everywhere and nowhere, like phantoms, so that the enemy fights against a fog of uncertainty, confusion, frustration, and shock. One way of ensuring that the enemy doesn't know exactly where all the soldiers are is by not creating a vast, real-time repository of exactly where they are, available to anyone who can distract the Borg queen, hack into the Pentagon, or sell a Dell to a lonely Marine who just lost his laptop, complete with a highly compromised Chinese chipset.

In summary, on the plus side all these new gee-whiz networking technologies might save hundreds of American lives, assuming that the added distraction doesn't actually cost lives. On the minus side they might get almost everyone one of them killed, wounded, or captured due to a total security breech, amounting to tens of thousands if not half a million lives. Potential enemies will undoubtedly reach a similar conclusion, and they can bide their time until such a breech becomes a reality, presenting us with a Pearl Harbor that comes after we've committed forces.

I'm not saying we shouldn't upgrade and try out new technology. I'm saying that we need to do it with eyes wide open to the potential pitfalls and disasters which can't be countered by even a million resitations of the mantra "But it's 256 bit!'

 

[Rett Mikhal]

While both sides of this argument have merit, no one has mentioned a very critical part of it: the EMP. As mentioned the Germans went around the oh-so-effective Maginot line, an EMP would destroy most electronics and nullify the need to crack encryption and the advantage of having it.

So far the only people I've heard talk about EMP defense are conspiracy theorists talking about the Nuclear Apocalypse and how the EMP would wipe out their data.... so not exactly reputable sources. I'm not sure there could be any defense for EMP other than turning off a computer (which ruins the point) or having a computer turn on and off again so fast the EMP bypasses it while it is off.. but how the computer would work, and how you could possibly time it so it ALWAYS bypassed it, remains hazy.

 

[STR]

^You can shield against EMP. Air Force One, along with any part of the national command authority (which handles orders for nuclear launch) is hardened against a nuclear class EMP.

blah blah blah

I'm not even going to go point-by-point on this. I am going to repeat that all of your argument has nothing to do with the whether or not omnipresent secure battlefield links are a good thing. Most of your arguments amount to grasping at straws that would apply to ANY kind of combat or intelligence situation, regardless of the technology involved. Yet, you seem to completely miss the biggest point of all of this when you go on about "overrunning a headquarters." The whole point of a network like this is so you can place a HQ far out of range of the actual fighting. This tells me that you're not really familiar with the technology and concepts involved. You also appear to lack the vision of how to apply this kind of technology by insisting it's more valuable to an enemy and largely worthless to the chain of command.

Also, no one cares about your supposed friend, your opinion of the American Education system. Both statements are entirely irrelevant and are an attempt to undermine the real issue at hand.