Tomorrow’s Troops Will Be Covered in Gadgets (the Army Hopes)

[unhappycamper]

Someday, somehow, soldiers running around the battlefield are going to be able to swap data and talk to each other, just like us civilians at home.

Tomorrow’s Troops Will Be Covered in Gadgets (the Army Hopes)
By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
October 28, 2010 | 4:25 pm

Surprising as it is to Blackberry-addicted civvies, the Army’s struggled for nearly twenty years to get soldiers tough, light, bandwidth-conserving gear that can allow them to find each other on a digital map. (You try getting a cell signal on day one of a war, or crawl through the mud with your iPhone.) But now three defense contractors are vying for an Army contract, due next spring, called Nett Warrior, the latest attempt to equip soldiers with mobile computers, maps and radios.

The three companies — Raytheon, Rockwell Collins and General Dynamics — were cautious in discussing the program during this week’s Association of the U.S. Army confab. The Army hasn’t bought any of their designs yet and they’ve got company secrets to protect from their competitors. But from what they describe, Nett Warrior may be lighter and more durable than its predecessors — particularly an on-again-off-again program called Land Warrior — and equipped with texting and better data-sharing functions. In other cases, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the Land Warrior tree: optics mounted on a helmet will still provide a screen right in front of a soldier’s eye, for instance.

At Rockwell Collins’ booth at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, a mannequin in soldier fatigues displayed some of the features that the company has in mind for Nett Warrior — a step Rockwell’s competitors didn’t take. “We think it’s important to show the program is real,” says Willie Croghan, a manager for business development at Rockwell. That’s a nod to the difficulties in delivering Land Warrior, which deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,with mixed results. The Army long wrestled with making the electronics tough enough for the battlefield and light enough for soldiers to comfortably wear.

Rockwell’s design for Nett Warrior — originally called the Ground Soldier Ensemble and begun in 2008 — features a handheld controller dangling off the mannequin’s chestplate. That’s the System Control Unit, a push-button keyboard with a circular mouse that directs the navigation and communications systems. It weighs about a pound and fits in a soldier’s hand. All told, the whole Rockwell Nett Warrior prototype weighs 7.6 pounds, about as much as the Army says it wants the system to weigh.

~snip~

The military’s made some adjustments on those fronts. High-priority units like the bomb-hunters in Task Force ODIN have been able to order up bandwidth from the Defense Department to get shipped out to Afghanistan. And some defense contractors created mobile cell towers that fit on the underside of a drone, providing a secure 3G network to soldiers below.

[Octafish]

1. There's a new helmet that has me, eh, concerned.

capable of operating “in a benign environment,”

Of course, the project has been, uh, expanded:

DARPA Wants to Install Transcranial Ultrasonic Mind Control Devices in Soldiers' Helmets

Old hat, so to speak, eh unhappycamper?

[unhappycamper]

4. Military spending is as frenzied as Chamber of Commerce spending.

They know big ticket items are (finally!!1!) getting some scrutiny and have gone to buying small.

Future Combat Systems is not dead.

[Blue_Tires]

2. how many more years before wars are simply fought with robots and computers?

[baldguy]

3. How to Build an EMP Generator

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-an-Emp-Generator

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. My first thought -

if the soldiers are dependent on electronic gadgets, how long until the other guys come up with a cheap, easy way to put out a pulse that will technologically blind them?