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. The sight also serves as a long-range zoom, with twelve times amplification. “It makes every rifleman a marksman,” Colonel Richard Hansen, Land Warrior’s project manager, crows. Night vision, and laser targeting – which once required clunky binoculars, or attachments to the gun — are now built in, too.
Getting this kind of gear out to troops has taken just about forever. First proposed in 1991, Land Warior went through one clunky, next-to-useless iteration after the next. One cost $85,000, and weighed over 40 pounds. Another was way too fragile for combat. Even this version 3.0 (now down to 12 pounds and $30,000 each) has had a bunch of weight, security, and usability issues.
The concerns were so great that the original vision — giving every soldier a full set of high-tech gear — has been scrapped. For now, only Manchu team leaders will get the entire Land Warrior ensemble, Col. Hansen tells Defense Tech. Regular riflemen will be equipped with GPS beacons, to let their sergeants and lieutennants know where they are.
It’s a small step. But a significant one.
UPDATE 12:10 pm: I was out with the Manchus at Ft. Lewis, WA, when they were testing out the Land Warrior gear. I’ll have a complete run-down of what I found in an upcoming issue of Popular Mechanics.
Equipping all soldiers with beacons that will broadcast their exact location? That’s fine against a low-tech enemy, but I can see a serious problem…
Wow, that sounds amazing!
I’d heard about the Land Warrior project, but never bothered to get some detailed information. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I read about that sight which “also serves as a long-range zoom” – that still sounds very sci-fi to me (still, I’d love to have one… ).
But I kinda agree with David there; how are they gonna make sure those beacons won’t be used against U.S. soldiers?
Anyways, I’ll definitely be on the lookout for that issue of Popular Mechanics – please post a short notice as soon as the article is available (online?).
David Hambling – Oh, come on now – don’t be too quick with the “Gee, the Army is dumb” comments. I am sure they have thought of that and will probably encrypt the outgoing signal to AES standards — similar to how they encrypt outgoing radio transmissions.
nmstarbucks – The Army isn’t dumb, but the guys over at PEO Soldier aren’t exactly rocket scientists either (I’ve worked with Gen Brown and he’s a bit of space case).
I don’t think they have considered an obvious issue: What if our opponents develop cheap EM radiation-seeking warheads and guidance systems? What about passive IED triggers tuned to Land Warrior’s GPS signal? Who needs a laser guide or IR tripwire when your target is lit up like a Christmas tree, right?
Don’t get me wrong – the Land Warrior is pursuing the right capabilities, its just going about it the wrong way. The Army wants the Land Warrior to evolve into the image of soldiers in black ninja outfits with motorcycle helmets. Why not draw from the lessons of commercial communications products, such as cellphones, PDAs and Blackberries?
Heck, the JASONs concluded in their Feb 2005 report on equipping troops with soldier sensors and communications that cellphones are good models for future soldier kit. It just seems like the good folks at PEO Soldier could use a reality check once in a while.
Hey, nmstarbucks, you have one fatal flaw in your thinking, and that is, to wit, the Army must have thought of all the prudent and easy ways to do things first. How many $500.00 coffee pots and $400.00 toilet seats do you have to be hit over the head with before you realize that command pressure and the ‘Army Way’ often get in the way of progress. My kid is a Navy EOD and I would not want him wearing one of these ’signal spitters’. All that hardware, and the gloves and balaclava appear to be the best pieces of gear.
‘That same monocle is connected to the weapon sight, so the infantryman can, in effect, shoot around corners’
A bit like duct-taping a 50 cent mirror on the barrel then?!?
On those beacons “so their sergeants and lieutenants know where they are.” This is probably wrong. It’s so their captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, operations officers, chiefs of staff, intelligence officers, commanding generals, and deputy commanding generals know where they are.
I used to deal in tactical aviation C2 systems, and believe me, the more that the battle captains see, the more they are in the weeds controlling things that they probably don’t need to be controlling.
Most successful armed forces delegate C2 to the lowest level possible. This has been the trend since at least the Franco-Prussian War with the advent of open-order tactics. The armies that bled themselves white in WWI were the ones insisting on “regimental column, battalion on line” formations, while the Germans actually learned to press their C2 to small detachments. Ernst Juenger, a WWI storm troop officer (wounded 14 times, several decorations for gallantry), said in his WWI memoir “The Storm of Steel,” that “all success in battle depends on individual initiative.” I’m inclined to agree.
Giving these systems to individual soldiers will stifle initiative precisely because:
1) higher will always be up their a$$ telling them what to do… (“hey you…Pvt Bonottz…move to the right 10 meters. There’s a bad pixel on my Blue Force Tracker and I can’t see you when you stand there!”).
And…
2) The psychological impact of having the all-seeing eye of higher on the individual soldier will be just as bad.
In short…armies don’t win because of high-tech gear, and they don’t win because generals see everything. They win because individual soldiers, squads, platoons, and companies, with the help of combined arms, locate, close with, and destroy the enemy.
The ultra hitech, ‘Future Force Warrior’ is scheduled for 2014….could a story be done on it’s progress and development?
Let’see here…..
Say 400 fighting men in a “Light” Infantry BN.
That’s $12,000,000 for a BN’s basic uniforms!
Add spares etc say $18,000,000
I see BIG problrms here, forget the cost!
1. Major Command Micro Management Fiasco’s
2. Deadly Countermeasures
3. Troops who can’t find their way around without their “goodies”
4. Maintenance Nightmares
5. A Battery WAREHOUSE for each platoon
How does this crap make it this far into development?
The word ‘interation’ (fourth graf) threw me – I thought I was being introduced to a new word. But now I think it was just a typo for ‘iteration’. Damn.
Beacons, isn’t the term they probably meant to say. Meaning……. most of all the vehicles are using a GPS based navigation system yes. Some of these units are using maping technology that lets others in the unit and higher ups see their position as well. Everything is encypted and is linked through the encrypted radio signals. I am assuming that the land warrior outfits will have the same technology and show their positions using the same manner. So, if the enemy is seeing the land warriors, they are seeing all the vehicles as well. I am quite sure that they are not.
Damn… thought I fixed that.
Just wait until the Army figures out how to pump money into making their soldiers invisible to the naked eye. If it can be done with a small cylinder it can be done to a human. I imagine Snipers will get it first and then just wait for enemy snipers to start setting up when they think no one is around.
How much of this has been designed with COTS? Given where Land Warrior and all the other “21st Century” soldier projects have started, has there been any real keeping-up with progress made in the civilian world?
low-power CPUs, Bluetooth/UWB, low-power OLED screens, cheap GPS and cameras, a lot has changed since the early ’90s.. And it’s gotten cheap.
I wonder how much of Land Warrior could be built in a garage using COTS parts and some clever programming? I’d bet we could see some interesting analogues on a paintball field first..
Otis:
I’ll get more into this in the Pop Mech story, but the COTS approach has been tried… and abandoned. Too fragile for combat — at least the stuff that was used at the time.
nms
There is also an upshot, being able to understand how things went down in combat is useful for updating tactics and training. I’m hoping the army is smart enough to not let these become micromanagement devices.
Worisome is what the troups do when the equipment fails. They still need to be able to soldier with out the super-soldier gear.
It’s definitely understandable that even ruggedized civilian gear isn’t up to infantry spec (though from what I’m told some folks in the field prefer civilian GPS units and camo patterns), but I wonder if there isn’t value in ruggedizing some of the latest ‘n greatest, considering how fast tech has changed.
Granted, if you have to go GaAs for EMP hardening you probably can’t take advantage of most of it, but given the foes we fight these days, I wonder if you couldn’t field something that isn’t up to thermonuclear war spec but can handle the dust, blood and grime of urban warfare.
Remember too that a lot of this stuff was designed for early ’90s technology (or earlier!) and you can probably do a lot more with a low-power x86 chip of 2003-2004 vintage than you could with an entire array of chips from 1992-1993 (say a 486), with a lower power budget (thus lighter batteries)..
Hmmm.
1. Bluetooth is horribly insecure and I frankly keep it disabled. Considering that many new cellphones are equipped with Bluetooth, would you really want a soldier’s gear to be vulnerable to a cellphone?
2. COTS is a great concept, but often completely unworkable in harsh environments. COTS is designed for home use and, for some things, when camping, fishing or hunting. Very few COTS gear is designed to be treated in as hard a fashion as an infantryman must by necessity.
3. Anybody starting to see a certain similarity between the Land Warrior stuff and say the Colonial Marines from Aliens?
[From the link about security issues]
“With Type 3 encryption, there is no schedule risk. NSA is weary [wary?] of that type of encryption, but Type 3 is adequate for dismounted soldiers.�
Really? We want our enemies to be able to tell where all our soldiers are, and hear what they’re planning?
IMHO, if we don’t have the secuirty, the rest is WORSE than merely useless
One thing that worries me about this is that it’s only issued to squad leaders. The Land Warrior ensemble is pretty distinctive looking, and if an enemy knows that only squad leaders wear a distinctive sort of uniform, the leaders–who are now more centralized than ever–are going to be the first ones to go down.
And given that we’ve chosen to make our units even more centralized with this system–rather than increasing flexibility by, say, supplying *everybody* with regular radios–losing the leader is going to be that much more crippling for the rest of the unit.
Just my two cents.
Anyone remember ALIENS, the second ALIEN movie. Hello, maybe not in my lifetime, but quite a bit of what we have seen in the STAR TREK shows will come to pass.
So the military must have loads of free training time?
This is another pile of stuff dumped on an over tasked leader. Why not give a large unit a bunch of money, let the guys buy what they want, use it, lose it, throw it away and see what’s wanted and works. How about taking cues from actual field use, not a bunch of users psychologically joined the hope it works team?
I’ll give my 2 cents from my days in the Army, late ’70s to 80’s. We bought from Canadians their commando sweaters. Illegal but we wore them in the field. Army? 10 years and then for office dress. Ditto Aim point sights. Army? 20 years. Light weight bicycle sleeping bag. Had to hide it. Gore Tex, Army 10 years and so forth. And I was in SF!
It’s nice that the Army bureaucracy is willing to spend all this time, money and manpower. However modern management techniques have long since buried such slow centralized decision-making. Smitten Eagle has given a good historical example. I get a strong hint of the top down, flow down, and deal with it on this system. And don’t tell me it has had the best scientist, managers, real world field-testing. All of the failed junk the Army has had over the years has been like wise sheep dipped. I also get the feeling that this is so that more soldiers are suppose to get even more personal with our present bad guys, up close and not crack a chamber pot or disturb a page of the Koran or else an ever-present JAG team writes you a battlefield ticket for cultural insensitivity.
I am in no way against spending what ever a troop needs, or even might want to take a fly on. That is money and taxes I am happy about. I hope for the best.
It really doesn’t matter what the encryption they use, you don’t need to read any data to triangulate the location of a transmitting device, the only way they could get around this kind of issue would be to have the transmitting signal bounce around the spectrum, even then the power they output could still be detected.
I would like to know if they addressed the issue of EM noise coming out of the display, if not, it might be possible for the enemy not only to detect them coming, but also see whatever is popping up on their little screens.
Before this type of stuff goes out, how about at least a GPS and radio for every soldier in the desert right now, and shiny techno gizmos for a select few in the future.
My belief on emerging military technologies has almost yet to prove me wrong. When you are playing a game of cards and you win the game; you do not have to show the dealer and the others sitting at your table your winning cards. But when you decide to do so, you are usually fairly confident that you have nothing to worry about.
Where am I going with this? This gear is being issued to a standard battalion, not SpecOps operatives. We are just flexing our muscles and saying, “We’ll let you see this… and let you scratch you head trying to figure out what else we already have.” You cannot keep black-budgeting devices without someone approving the checks being given an tangible toy at some point. The F-117 was a stepping stone to prove we could use something smaller than the B-2 and give justification for the full green-light on the F-22, right?
P.S.> Anyone remember the acetylene powered “Aurora”? (At least, I believe it was acetylene powered…)
I think that anyone against these uniforms are dumb. Men and women that risk their lives to keep us and our family safe fromm terrorists need these uniforms.