US 'Land Warrior' wearable-computing headed to Iraq
The US Army's wearable tech programme for soldiers, Land Warrior, is dead in the water. Despite well over a decade of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in development funding, there remain very significant problems with the kit and it has received poor reviews from soldiers in testing. The equipment was de-listed from …
This is an excellent example of how the West was lost. We used to be an effective fighting force... What happened to the good old days when a regular gun, some cigarettes, and a few condoms were all the grunts needed to overthrow the most powerful armies in the world.
Perhaps another selling point of the gun camera is that - assuming it is programmed to start recording whenever the soldier touches the trigger - it will allow lawyers to determine if a soldier has opened fire lawfully in the event that a soldier kills a civilian , or kills an enemy combatant in a non-combat context. I imagine this will be seen as a mixed benefit, to say the least. The soldiers might dislike being second-guessed, or prosecuted for the accidental killing of a civilian. A recording gun camera would resolve a lot of mysteries, though.
Von Clausewitz observed "War is the Province of Friction, wherein the simplest things become difficult." On a complex, friction-filled battlefield, even the simplest weapon systems break down in unpredictable ways. High technology is unlikely to change this problem. In the Fog of War, high tech weapons are the least likely to perform as expected.
Governments spend so much money for such creations, yet majority of this stuff can be put together using off the shelf parts.
A few modifications, and your all set.
..every problem looks like a nail.
And the article hit the nail on the head with the comment about special-forces. Selection, training, morale, logistic support and trusted, proven kit are the route to an effective fighting force. Technology can help, of course, but only when it does it's job properly.
But western society is so besotted by technology that it now tends to ignore it's alternatives (or complements) and often misses potentially more effective low-tech or (heaven-forbid) human related alternatives (or complements) in favour of flashy, unproven 'cutting-edge' technological options that often cause more problems than they solve and at an insanely high cost.
I agree that this system might be pushing it, but a lot of people were anti-smartbomb when they were being developed in the reagan administration, saying that the exorbitant cost of the munitions wasn't justified. Those guys kind of shut up since a 100,000$ laser guided JDAM can effectively destroy what would have taken a carpet bombing 30 years ago.
If they make real life enough like Quake et al, then there are huge amounts of training that kids have been doing in their spare time...
Now all they need to do is to discover the cheats for unlimited ammo, invincibility etc....
