No matter what you think about the war’s rationale, you have to feel for the troops in harm’s way. Let’s hope Land Warrior works as advertised and doesn’t become another hardware fiasco that kills our people.
A high-tech collection of soldier gear, 15 years and half a billion dollars in the making, will finally make it into battle. The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry has adopted the Land Warrior suite of wearable electronics, and will take it with them to Iraq when they deploy next year. It’s the first time a large group of infantrymen will be tied to the combat network that’s connecting so much of the military.
These days, the vasy majority of dismounted soldiers don’t even have radios — let alone the electronic mapping and messaging tools that have become commonplace in most Humvees. That’ll change, once the “Manchus” of the 4/9 Infantry don the Land Warrior ensemble.
Radios and GPS locators come standard. A helmet-mounted monocle lets the soldier know he and his buddies are on a satellite-powered map. That same monocle is connected to the weapon sight, so the infantryman can, in effect, shoot around corners.
I wonder how much weight this gear will add once you factor in body armor and batteries?
Fiasco or not, it will certainly kill people.
Hopefully on the other side…
Yeah. The bad guys.
I discussed this scene a few years back with an acquaintance — a West Point grad with whom I loved to discuss military history btw — who was in charge of wringing out test sessions with RA and Guard types who were training to supervise these systems.
She had one problem that seemed to never end. The geeks running the systems would rather play games on the hardware than pay attention to what they were supposed to be doing with real soldiers. Hopefully, that changes in combat.
Eideard, I’m sure it will change, but if you were in their shoes wouldn’t you want to play around with this technology too? I’m really excited about this being deployed in war. This is what Rumsfeld meant by high tech war, and I’m glad to see it is being utilized. I’m more interested to see how this implementation of capital will change labour productivity. I’m assuming that the gear would weight another 20-30 pounds, but the ability to utilize cover more effectively with fire and maneuver tactics will make up for the excess weight. As a final note, the ability to mark indirect fire coordinates with the GPS system will make a large difference, in both inflicting maximum damage on the enemy while minimizing collateral damage.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough. They were playing games they brought along and stuffed into the system — not the onboard goodies! This was in the shipping container control centers that communicate with the grunts.
Give them the best you can – if it saves one life or zaps a bad guy – its worth it.
Unfortunately we are not losing extensive lives to block-by-block battle….we would win that war. We are up against an enemy that can never establish air or ground superiority but continues to disrupt.
This system is not a miracle cure and is certainly not going to increase effectiveness against EOD/IOD and other roadside nasties that are claiming so many lives.
We MUST get this aspect of the war back in hand.
Seems like it is becomming more and more like that armor from Halo every day.
They’ve been testing it for years, so my concern has to have been addressed – hasn’t it?: That monocle sure looks like it could cause a blind spot in the soldier’s field of view.
Holding my hand in front of one lens of my glasses shows me the blind-spot is not very big, but isn’t depth perception affected as well?
Does the monocle block the line of sight [opaque], or is it more of a HUD-type screen you can see though?
It provides a completely second view, Mike. It can take a feed from the gun camera or a computer screen or orders from command.
My secondary concern after weight is task management. Then again, someone who is used to playing a FPS game with all that data around the screen would take to a system like this like a duck to water.
I hope.
Has anyone thought of the battery life for all of this new gear? How long can a soldier go without recharging their gadgetry? Is there a manual crank (like some cell phone chargers) to use as a backup? Another aspect to take into consideration is how dependant soldiers may become on the new gear. In the event of a device failure, or even one of those electromagnetic bombs that fry unprotected electronics, will the soldiers know what to do?
Rumsfeld’s idea of a high tech army is a failure. Standing armies haven’t really gone at each other since the 1967 Six Day War. Since then all wars have been guerrilla actions and the high tech stuff just doesn’t work against an improvised bomb.
A heavy tank is great when you go up against another tank, but useless against civilians populations. F-16s and F-18s can drop big bombs but they can’t get personal. HumVees are handy, but they still stand between the troops and the people.
The US didn’t lose the Viet Nam War because of equipment. They lost the war because the troops hid behind their equipment too much. With helicopters flying in a platoon to a hot spot then flying them back to a cold beer after dinner couldn’t create any rapport with the peasants. The only safe place for Americans were in a few cities.
After the Army slowed their missions against the villages, the CIA started to win the hearts and minds of the peasants with food and medical care. If the CIA could have started their civilian programs earlier and had the army protect them, there is little doubt the N.V. would have lost the war.
If you can win over the people, as happened after WWII with the Marshal Plan and in Japan and Korea with leadership, then you don’t face continual fighting. If you try to subjugate the civilians then they will hate you and always be looking to do you in.
The lessons of WWII were forgotten.
I hope they don’t use Sony batteries. I’d hate to see all these guys running around on fire before they got into battle. đ
Dead and dying batteries could result in dead or wounded soldiers. Once you start depending on a capability, it’s extremely disruptive to have it blink out on you during battle.
Gear with extra weight & complexity, generally speaking, does not make for a more effective warrior – as those who conduct guerilla warfare & insurgencies demonstrate.
It will cost $30,000 per soldier for all this equipment, not including maintenance & upkeep costs. Meanwhile our Pentagon won’t spend half that on adequate body armour now (particularly DragonSkin). There is no better force multiplier than soldiers who live to fight again.
The RF signal this gear will give off could easily be used as a ‘homing beacon’ for any enemy trying to target them. Think IEDs set to go off at LandWarrior frequencies, or a hacked GPS signal emanating from our troopers being used to target them with mobile rockets (like the kind Hezbolla uses).
This is a stupid idea.
15,
Excellent point. Odyssey67, but I disagree that it is a bad idea. Properly deployed, it should work. I reserve complete judgement myself, but we are at a stage with the technology that it needs to be battle-tested, as any weapons system before it.
>>> Rumsfeldâs idea of a high tech army is a failure. Standing armies havenât really gone at each other since the 1967 Six Day War. Since then all wars have been guerrilla actions and the high tech stuff just doesnât work against an improvised bomb.
I think you don’t really understand Rumsfeld’s vision Mr. Fusion. The fact is that Rummy’s plan to fight the Iraq war was initially wildly successful. We were able to methodically destroy the enemy forces with unprecedented precision utilizing a force structure that was up until that time thought to be ridiculously small by many military planners. Compare the following: “214,000 Americans, 45,000 British, 2,000 Australians and 2,400 Polish” troops vs, “Iraqi armed forces to number 389,000 (army 350,000, navy 2,000, air force 20,000 and air defense 17,000), the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam 44,000, and reserves 650,000.[47] Another estimate numbers the army and Republican Guard at between 280,000 to 350,000 and 50,000 to 80,000, respectively,[48] and the paramilitary between 20,000 and 40,000.[49] There were an estimated thirteen infantry divisions, ten mechanized and armored divisions, as well as some special forces units.” (source info Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Military_aspects )
As history shows, we destroyed the Iraqi military and government in the space of about three weeks while simulaneously securing the Iraqi oil fields largely intact. And we did it with very few casualties. This was an extremely impressive feat given the preparation time for the Iraqis to fortify their country against the invasion.
However the whole plan fell apart with bad planning for the occupation.. There was a failure to anticipate the rise of the insurgency and a failure to adequately plan for policing the cities of during the post invasion occupation. The lessons we have learned in Iraq is that even if you have a highly destructive and mobile force to conduct a war with an enemy, you still need a large occupational force to secure the peace. That was our blindspot. If we had deployed the 500,000-600,000 soldiers to police Iraq after destroying the Iraqi military, the insurgency would not have been able to organize and be effective. And we should have secured the Iraqi borders to prevent the infilitration of foriegn fighters into the country. Unfortunately, in order to secure Iraq now, we’d need to deploy more troops and that will never fly politically after being stuck there for 3 years and counting.
However, our initial sucess in Iraq is what is motivating the North Koreans build nuclear weapons. They are painfully aware that America could easily dispatch the North Korean military and government with the same effectiveness that we employed in Iraq. And the the other thing they have going against them is their civilian population is so starved and lacks basic necessities that they’d be unable to mount an effective domestic insurgency. And they have no support from a religiously motivated cadre of foreign fighters either. And the North Koreans (and Chinese leadership for that matter) are highly suspicious of the West and the USA in particular. Being the Cold War leftovers, they believe that America was responsible for engineering the downfall of the Soviet Union and they’re very cognizant of the fates that befell many of the communist leadership after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Given the destructive power of nuclear weapons coupled with their own domestically developed missile program, the North Korean leadership feels that the only way they can survive is by upping the ante with Nukes. And the sad fact is, they’re probably right for the interim. The clock is ticking and they are just postponing the inevitable.
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Given enough time I think we’ll be seeing robotic soldiers fighting in the coming decades. You won’t be seeing a continual morale sapping media body count playing on network news every night in future conflicts. Darpa has had a project out there for some time now investigating the use of a Segway as a mobile weapons platform: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/23/0347211
As far as the Land warrior concept goes, I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg in it’s potential to make our forces even more lethal in the modern battlespace. I almost pity the people who are going to be going up against us in the future… almost . đ
#17, Ze,
I don’t understand your direction here. You toss up a lot of numbers, but missed the point. The two armies largely didn’t even meet. The poorest quality Iraqi troops were in the front lines and largely surrendered without firing a shot. The better quality Iraqis melted away with most of their weapons before the Americans got within range. Overall, the whole Iraqi military was in terrible shape after sanctions and the first Gulf War. That the Americans âconqueredâ Iraq in three weeks isn’t a surprise, it would have been a surprise if the Iraqis had of made a fight out of it.
Because of the lack of troops, over run areas were not properly secured as the (allied) troops just kept pushing on. Later, when it came time to round up the Baathist supporters, the offices had all been ransacked so no one knew who were the Baathists and who were the ordinary citizens. Iraqi munition dumps were left unguarded and subsequently looted by the Iraqi underground. Iraqi infrastructure was ransacked by civilians looking for something they could sell for cash and food.
Americans would drive through cities and towns in their huge military vehicles, stopping occasionally to round up some suspicious Iraqis. Later, we had the prisons, like Abu Graib filled with âsuspectedâ Iraqi terrorists. The lack of American troops impeded the actual booking and interrigation. As many as 24,000 Iraqis languished in Abu Graib, all the time developing anti American attitudes. More prisoners were held in other camps.
While the Iraqi hospitals were without electricity, medicines, or bandages, American troops complained that their bases didn’t have air conditioning. So if you were a sick Iraqi and can’t get any treatment in the 100+ heat, while the invading army that took away your brother drinks beer in air conditioned comfort, what will happen to your attitude?
It doesn’t matter what toys you go to war with. Those big toys won a few battles and even destroyed a few hotels with reporters. It will always be the grunts going door to door that win the war. It will be the grunts rebuilding the country that win over the people. Rumsfeld sent too few troops into Iraq and we have lost the war.
North Korea is an entirely different topic.
First thought on seeing the equipment: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
Ooooh… A jiggling target with built in flashing lights! I bet they’ll be easier to spot by snipers!
Mr. Fusion, the point is warfare has changed. We did kick ass in Iraq. The problems we’ve had in Iraq isn’t a problem with Rumsfeld’s “idea of a high tech army” the problem you’re talking about is the way in which we implemented the occupation – those are 2 different issues. We won the war with a smaller but highly lethal force, but winning the peace still requires a large contigent of boots on the ground. And although we went up against an Iraq that was by comparison from the first gulf war, a force that was of a lesser quality, they were still a force to be reckoned with. Even though the Iraqis had endured 10 years of sanctions, they still managed to get a lot of banned military equipment (some of it very good quality stuff from France, Germany, the UK, Russia and China among other places) – which underscored the ineffectiveness of a UN sanction. Which is one of the reasons we went to war there in the first place.
North Korea is a different issue entirely, the whole political/military dynamic on the North’s part is driven by the fact that they are feeling vunerable.because of the successes America has had in Iraq. The leadership was totally surprised by the speed in which Saddam’s military fell, which is why they feel they needed Nukes. Read Arnaud de Borchgrave’s article yesterday in the Washington Times about the paranoid leadership in North Korea: http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20061019-090449-7656r.htm
#21, Ze
Again you failed to see the point. The US could have dropped a few nuclear weapons on the Iraqis too and still have won. The question then would have been What have they won. Well, they did the next thing to dropping nuclear weapons, they bombed the crap out of Iraq which didn’t have any defensive capability. They sent heavy tanks against an army that didn’t have any armor. Kuwait could have beaten them !!! And what did they win?
If you spend the entire budget on high tech gadgetry, then there just isn’t enough left to pay for the troops. There isn’t enough for the troops to get into the civilian population. And there isn’t enough money to help the civilians transition from the previous dictatorship to a new government.
Because the Army had cut back so much on the troops and personal equipment, they had to hire Haliburton to supply it in the field. The Army had extra M1A1 Abrams transports but they didn’t have enough trucks to carry food, water, fuel, or even munitions. Even after they had annihilated Saddam’s army.
At last count, there are 18 front line Aircraft Carriers in the US Navy. They are so expensive to operate though that only 3 or 4 are ever at sea at the same time. The same with the B1 bomber, and the Submarine fleet. The Aircraft fighters cost so much that on 9/11 there was only something like four F-16s available on the East Coast. That was the day after Rumsfeld announced the new smaller more high tech military.
Not only are all these high tech toys expensive to buy, they are expensive to operate and maintain. Just last week we discussed the HumVee needing a special bolt that could only be made by one company. The same applied to most of the military hardware today.
This is the attitude that won the battle but has lost the war.
What has not been announced is higher pay for the military. While their husbands are in Iraq, the grunt’s families are collecting welfare and food stamps. Returning veterans have the highest rate of homelessness of any veterans group. Injured troops are drummed out with very little or no support. Sure, enlistment targets are being met, but only through stop-loss and lowering standards. The trained, experienced troops are not re enlisting. Often because of the redeployments and also because of the low pay.
#21, pls use tiny URL or link your URL. It spoils the page formating.
SmartAlix, the General Dynamics web site contains a PDF of the system and when you add up the numbers it comes to 18.44 lbs. Of that 18 lbs, only 4.55 lbs is taken by the batteries, but they don’t state how long these last. I couldn’t find any specs on power consumption but as any decent strategist would assume, you have to carry at least one spare pack which would bring the gear itself to a total of about 23 lbs.
[Joke Alert]And their site mentions that the Sony batteries provide a tactical advantage on the battlefield! [/Joke Alert]
Kevlar-based body armour nowadays weighs “only” 16.4 lbs compared to the old Flak vest (25.1 lbs) which brings the total to 40lbs…
Makes me think of the Battle of Courtrai in 1302 where the cavalry was stopped for the first time in history by the infantry: a bunch of Flemish peasants with sharpened sticks and a few maces stopped the French cavalry wearing full body armour…
Fabrizio
Fusion, I know the argument you’re making and some of your points have validity, but you’re missing the big picture. True you can spend a huge fortune on technology and the question becomes, “does the amount of money your spending worth the extra edge your presumably getting for your military?” Historically America has always traded treasure for blood. We don’t like to see losses and we want to give our guys the best equipment around bar none. And if you want to get crass about it, the number of casualties we’ve had to endure has been extrordinarily low. Despite our guys being placed in harms way, improvements in armor and combat medicine have raised survivability rates from injuries that would have killed them only 20-30 years earlier.
Don’t think though, that any army could have pulled off the land invasion with the speed and efficiency of the US Army. True, the Iraqis were being bombed for weeks in preparation, but no conflict has ever been won without having boots on the ground. You can’t occupy a country with aircraft. We pulled off an invasion with a minimal ground presence and you can’t just chalk all that up to the bombing campaign. There was a lot of fierce resistance in the ground campaign and the Army destroyed a lot of armor that survived the air bombardment. That’s the qualitative edge we’ve bought with our investments in our military.
The Army didn’t have to cut back on the troops or the personel, but they did because it was politically expedient to do so. It wasn’t just a question of money although that did factor into war planning, it’s pretty clear that Rumsfeld felt that he could win the war with fewer troops which was his goal and he was ultimately proven right. Go read thae newspapers just before the war and you won’t find many people even questioning the judgement to go to war. With the anger we’d carried since 9/11 we’d have gone to Iraq even if the war was going to cost $20 or $50 Billion more. As far as hiring Haliburton, that was a political expediency to privatize casualities in the occupation.
You mention the Navy and it’s Aircraft carriers. Yes, they are very expensive, and yes only a few of them are at sea at any one time, but if we cut back on the carriers and their associated battlegroups you’d be forcing the crews to be deployed abroad for longer and longer periods of time which will affect morale and readiness. One reason our guys could mount the number of sorties they flew was because we train our guys well and we don’t push them beyond their physical limits. When the cold war ended everyone was talking about the “Peace Dividend” and that talk faded pretty quickly when it become painfully evident that the world was entering into a more unpredictable and more unstable new world order.
You might question whether we are spending our money wisely and that is always a good thing to question, but I don’t think you can make the charge stick that Rumsfeld’s modernization of the military has been a failure. It clearly has been a success. The failures in Iraq have been one of policy and implementation, and that is a very important distinction to make.
Ze,
Historically America has always traded treasure for blood. We donât like to see losses and we want to give our guys the best equipment around bar none.
Not true. It has only been since WWII that America has truly aimed for technical superiority. Credit a few guys with wisdom, such as Admiral King and General Marshal and the inspiration from that little European conflict. The British showed the way with RADAR the importance of technology. (I could write a whole paper on this, so fill in any blanks) Before then American troops made do with old equipment and were under financed even for that.
Your second paragraph reinforces exactly what I pointed out. Except the last couple of sentences. You still give credit to non existent Iraqis who had no efficient weapons. Their tanks, artillery, small arms, anti-tank weapons, and whatever else were worn out and badly in need of repair after a going through two wars and then a decade of sanctions. Most of it was Soviet equipment from the mid ’70s to early ’80s, already way past its prime. Formidable only on paper by someone trying to make a case that Iraq was a threat.
It wasnât just a question of money although that did factor into war planning, itâs pretty clear that Rumsfeld felt that he could win the war with fewer troops which was his goal and he was ultimately proven right
A White House Budget Director was fired for suggesting that the war might cost up to $200 billion dollars. General Shinseki was fired for suggesting they needed up to three times the number of troops needed. And did you forget what happened next? The American public was presented with irrefutable evidence that IRAQ possessed WMDs. So of course newspapers did not question the war. And I guess Mission Accomplished means that we won the war but lost the occupation.
We lost the war simply because it hasn’t ended. We have lost almost as many troops as died during 9/11. While a paper army was destroyed, (they melted away in the night) we didn’t confiscate the weapons or munitions. Now those same weapons are being used against our troops.
About two weeks ago we discussed an Army patrol guarding a Haliburton convoy. When the convoy came under attack, the Army unit ran. Was this the defeated Iraqi Army remnants you say was destroyed so effectively that made our Army run?
When the cold war ended everyone was talking about the âPeace Dividendâ and that talk faded pretty quickly when it become painfully evident that the world was entering into a more unpredictable and more unstable new world order.
And that includes a combined multi-national effort to build the latest generation fighter-bomber, the F-35. The military claims that the F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 are still the most advanced fighters in the world today with no one coming close, even if they can’t do shit against guerrilla warfare.. So we drop more money into developing an even more expensive money pit. Ooopps, forgot. The Cold War is over but the Industrial Military Complex is till in need of tax payer money. And there is a lot more money going into the F-35 development then there is being invested in better body armor for the troops or for translators on the ground in Iraq.
You’re drifting off the point I called you on initially. You still haven’t made the case that a high tech army is a “failure”. Sure we could go low tech and build a military that uses improvised explosive devices and other such low tech means, but I think that the cost in our soldiers lives would become unacceptablly high to the American public. A human being is a very effective smart bomb, and I’m sure the insurgency probably has a few more of those to detonate. There is a cost in using those kinds of weapons and it’s not measured in just money. Treasure or Blood, which would you rather pay?
>>> We lost the war simply because it hasnât ended.
I wouldn’t say that we “lost” Iraq yet. Would I say that we had bad planning? Without a doubt. It would probably be very wise to put the Iraqis in the military role and leave it up to them to use whatever means to crush the insurgency.
Ze, my point is that the Americans did well inside their highly protective vehicles. Unfortunately they had a very hard time getting out of the vehicles and meeting the people. THAT is where the war will finally be won or lost. It will be the grunts that win the war.
Try this link out from the International Herald Tribune. It is exactly what I have been saying is not happening. Well, let me rephrase that. It hasn’t been happening enough because there are simply not enough troops on the ground in Iraq.
http://tinyurl.com/y89a4x
You’re absolutely right, it will be the grunts who win the war, if the American public and the politicians let them.
I think though the point you’re trying to make is that we shouldn’t rely on technology to fight our battles and that is important that we don’t become totally reliant on technology because sometimes technology can and will fail us.
True we have had some particular problems with the deployed weapon systems, but the problems you’re talking about is one of policy or implementation.
All this high tech gear and the US military is still getting it’s collective ass kicked by a bunch of sheep herders with outdated weapons and improvised explosive devicesin Iraq. Now is that a testimonial to the effectiveness of the sheep herders or to the incompetence of the US high tech military?