U.S. Soldiers Hate New High-Tech Gear 619
mattnyc99 writes "Land Warrior, the Army's wireless equipment package featuring helmet cams, GPS, laser range-finders and a host of other state-of-the-art electronics, is finally ready for deployment on a global battlefield network in Iraq after 15 years of R&D at the Pentagon. But in a report for Popular Mechanics, Noah Shachtman not only tries on the new digital armor—he talks to troops who don't like it at all. As if that wasn't disheartening enough for the future of tech at war, the real Land Warrior system doesn't even match up to its copycat gear in Ghost Recon 2."
Shock! Horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, duh. Otherwise I'd start bitching that my crossbow isn't as accurate at 500 yards as its Half-Life copycat.
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what the hell does Ghost Recon 2 have to do with anything?
Real life isnt the same as a video game? Then why did I feel so huge after I ate those mushrooms?
Inexperienced Users + High Tech = (Score:2, Insightful)
Get the basics right first (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of _the_AK-47_and_M16.
On the inevitability of this being used against us (Score:5, Insightful)
the smart other side captures
one of our soldiers?
You were using what for a can opener? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does this equipment stop IEDs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of Batman Begins quote about the high tech body armor... you know the one.
Lag kills. (Score:5, Insightful)
But then I read that the tracking capabilities can lag up to a minute behind: I certainly couldn't play a first person shooter with a 60,000ms ping - how could this be any less of a problem in real life?
Despite my vehement tecnophillia, I too wonder if this gear is really a benefit.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyone know what those are for?
Techno-bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
"It is a hard heart that kills!" - Full Metal Jacket
Hiro turns off all the techno-bullshit. The statistics about his impending death distract him... - Snow Crash
What happens to this whole thing when the batteries die? Or when they have to jump in the water and it shorts out? Or when it just, you know, breaks? Soldiering is soldiering, no matter what technologies you equip your soldiers with. It's about being adaptable, flexible, and enduring. This techno crap isn't really any of those things.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:2, Insightful)
What scares me is irrational people who ascribe human traits to inanimate objects. There's no such thing as an "assault rifle", just assault humans. A rifle without a human can do nothing but collect dust. A human without a rifle can find other tools to accomplish their goals, anything from a primitive club to a hijacked airliner.
Training Gadgets (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On the inevitability of this being used against (Score:5, Insightful)
You raise a good point. The enemy could then don the helmet and immediately find out troop positions and other intel. So what are the possible countermeasures to prevent this from happening?
Warface intel is great, but the more widely you make it available, the harder it becomes to contain, pretty much like any other piece of information in society.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:5, Insightful)
1 - The numbers are always in order, but every type of object has it's own series. The M16 is the sixteenth rifle adopted by the Army and the M4 is the fourth in a different series. It's a carbine or SMG or something like that.
2 - The M4 is just a shorter version of the M16. The only differences are the buttstock assembly and the barrel/handguard assembly and with the proper tools it takes about 15 minutes to convert an M16 into an M4 or vice versa. If you don't care about swapping the buttstock you can do the conversion by simply swappinng the upper receiver which takes less than a minute and requries no tools. There has been evolution in some design elements but these are also included in the M16s, either when they are purchased new or when they go to an armory for refitting. A current M4/M16 is tougher than a Viet Nam era M16, but there are many current M16s and M4s in use that were originalyl purchased 40 years ago and have simply been upgraded over the years.
3 - Even the original M16 doesn't lack much in durability or reliability. It takes a little more maintenance and is can be more finicky about the quality of the ammunition but when taken care of it is very reliable and those tighter tolerances make for a much more accurate weapon. If I were selecting a weapon to issue to poorly trained conscripts then I'd choose the AK, but for professional soldiers who know how to take care of their equipment the M16/M4 family is the better option.
generals tell all (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:1, Insightful)
Assault Rifles are the fully or selective automatic mofo's you do not want to be on the wrong end of.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapons [wikipedia.org]
Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why, so more soldiers can get killed? And this crap about "great volunteer work" helping the military. Hell, you're using technology that the military helped to create to post your silly rant. Why be a hypocrite, stop using the internet if you think it's a moral issue to mix the civilian and military worlds. What, the internet has gone beyond it's simple DOD beginnings, well the same can be said about Linux as well. The maker of any tool has to be aware that their tool can be used for negative things. Given that, if they still decide to create the tool then they are in no moral position to complain about it.
Re:Yeah... (Score:2, Insightful)
What the hell? Do you want to disband your military or something? Where does this come from?
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:3, Insightful)
And while ammunition prices have skyrocketed recently, mostly because the US military has purchased the entire output of most of the major manufacturers 5.56, it isn't hard to come by. Ammoman [ammoman.com] has been able to keep a steady supply of Wolf, usually has various Lake City products, SS109, etc etc.
Also, most US brick and mortar shops (Wal-Marts even) will have larger stocks of 5.56x45 than 7.62x54R.
Fundamental problem with Military and business (Score:5, Insightful)
We should be spending money on training and intelligence gathering. The military is suffering from the same tech envy as the rest of the population is suffering, and yet they have no one to be envious of. The enemy can blow up your $100,000 humvee with $5 worth of materials available in a third world country corner store. They don't care how big your guns or computers are. Spend some goddamn money on real intelligence gathering and building knowledge and experience of your troops.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:5, Insightful)
Unsurprising (Score:3, Insightful)
From TFA
I heard this pretty much every time new gear came to the boat. It was never as useful as the old stuff, and breaks more often too. (Sometimes, _very_ rarely, it's actually true.) Sounds like a Seargeant that needs to be busted and someone who will do the job put in his place. The job of a Sgt. is to teach people how to use and integrate the gear into their tactics. If his people don't or won't use the gear - it's his job to find out why, and report the same up the chain.
Noise canceling headphones (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a set, they amplify ambient sounds (crunch of gravel under foot, whispers, vehicle engines in the distance)and clip the amplitude peaks of loud or sudden sounds.
You can hear whispered sighting instructions yet protect your hearing when you squeeze the trigger (muffled boom) and right back to whispered conversation.
Re:you don't say? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does this equipment stop IEDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
What you, and everyone who thinks along these lines, don't understand is that all military conflicts are by definition political. Not only that, but you also fail to define "won". In military terms, we already won. We just failed to keep the peace in Iraq.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:4, Insightful)
So, apart from the fact that some guns look scarier than others, their dangerousness has much more to do with the shooter (and the cartridge) than with the furniture on the weapon.
Re:Get the basics right first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:On the inevitability of this being used against (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:3, Insightful)
A person with no intent to assault anyone isn't going to do any harm to humans simply because they possess a weapon that can fire 600 rounds per minute. True, they don't technically need it either, but simply having it does no harm.
Re:On the inevitability of this being used against (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Techno-bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you might miss the point. Technology is made to expand fire power or force extension.
A soldier who relies on good soldiering by poor technology will still be defeated by a bad soldier with exponentially better technology.
Even if the bad soldier's technology of breaks and the low tech soldier kills him, there will be another bad soldier with good technology to replace him. (ie... Soldier with AK47 kills soldier whose GPS has failed, but other solider aware of battle calls in air strike from a warship 150 miles away killing the AK47 soldier)
Rate of failure is consider part of the casualties which is actually the deciding factor in warfare more so than good soldiering and good technology.
Example: German soldiers in WWII did not loose because they were not as good soldiers or had bad gear (which in reality they were often better soldiers and had better technology than their counter parts) but rather they were simply unable to replace their losses both in manpower and their gear.
Hence, which is why the Pentagon is trying to come up with autonomous solutions as quickly as possible. I suspect by 2020 we will have Bolos running around on the battlefield and talking about "what the grunts" want will be a moot point because if you simply can replace your casualties with an assembly line... Well you can simply out build the enemy regardless of how many casualties they inflict.
Imagine if you will an Iraq war in which the insurgents could not kill a single American soldier because they were simply all in bunkers somewhere controlling their military units. A bloodless war (at least for us) in which the politicians wouldn't have to worry about people voting out of office for too many casualties.
Missing the point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's start off with the interface. Why is it hanging in front of half your face? If I'm being shot at, my first concern is going to be shooting back accurately, and if that damn thing gets in my way it's going off and not coming back till after everything is done.
The preferred option should have been a full width half-visor, similar to a hockey visor. See-through (probably slightly tinted), non shiny, not-in-the-way, but if you want data displayed on it, you can use it as a projection surface. Build the projection hardware into the helmet. You don't need much, because really, you don't need full-colour 30FPS.
Now, I do believe everyone should have an earpiece and short-range transmitting microphone built into the helmet as well. That just makes sense.
Video... yes, let's wirelessly link video from your gun into a projection on your helmet. But let's not go adding stuff just for fun. Change up the scope, take it from optical to digital, and in filters for night-scope, infra, etc, display it on a nice small TFT at the back of the scope, and wirelessly send it to the helmet. Now your gun is still mostly the same, but you have this extra functionality without more shit hanging from your kit.
Wires... why the hell does this thing have wires everywhere? They're a hazard waiting for an excuse to fuck you up. The only possible visible wire should be power from the body-mounted battery pack to the helmet. Everything else should be built in surface connections on your armour. A full-function controller on your forearm, powered by a surface pad connection on your jacket, is really the only other thing that should be out.
And while we're at it... is the M16 really the gun of choice for urban combat? The feedback I've had from people who've been over there has been that it's simply too big, too long, for the majority of what they do. It's great to be able to sniper some sucker from 500ft, but when all you want to do is crawl under the jeep, shoot the guy on the corner, then sneak around the corner and shoot the other guys, it's just too long. Let's switch up to a shorter, stockier gun (but with the same ammo, otherwise it's a nightmare). That guy in Israel demo'd the Amazing Folding Gun last year, that's a perfect bet. No need to expose yourself, you can do new and nifty things with it, and having the screen on the back end of the gun means that can be your one main place for information. Power it with contact pads on your gloves, so no wires between you and the gun.
And speaking of information... this is the one part that worries me. You're taking these soldiers, who have to keep their location 100% secret or they die, and sticking a transmitter on them. It doesn't matter if it's encrypted, or if it goes up to a satellite or connects to AOL and uses a Buddy List to update everyone on where you are... it's still putting out power, and it's not gonna take long before someone goes "Hey, I don't need to know what is being sent out, I just have to get a scanner to see if there's any signals being radiated, and from where". Broadcasting your location probably isn't the best idea, it's just a matter of time until it gets you killed.
So what extra EQ do we have here? A visor, small LED projection system, and a mike... maybe an extra kilo? Probably not even. Weight penalties from changes to the gunsight are offset by the new model. Extra weight for the folding stock and screen. 2 kilos, max, but worth it for the functionality. Running all this shouldn't take much, hell, the new Palms have enough processing power. And with such little equipment, batteries suddenly became a whole lot lighter. Now you have a much more effective soldier, in audio communication on demand, and he isn't burdened by 17 pounds of crap that looked cool in 1999.
The focus of this project should have been "Improving the soldier", not "Improving the middle-level managers ability to micromanage". Give the soldier more info, easy communications, better visuals (night,
Re:Does this equipment stop IEDs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, exactly. Especially in a conflict like this the goals are political and you cannot separate the military methods used from those goals.
I have no doubt that the rules of engagement hamstring soldiers in life-and-death situations, and result in insurgents escaping. The thing is, in any situation where the soldier actually has a potential target, they're already way ahead of the game. When the IED goes off under the HUMMWV, when the suicide bomber in the buick blows up the car at the checkpoint, who exactly is the soldier supposed to shoot at? The guy looking around the corner? He could be the trigger man, or he could be an innocent bystander, or he could be a lookout working for the insurgents. You can't figure that out after the fact.
The real problem in Iraq is a failure of intelligence. We have no insight into the workings of the insurgents, we have no ability to infiltrate them without the explicit help of the local population, and they simply are not helping us. The local population, even the ones who are glad we invaded and took out Saddam, even the ones who look forward to a stable democratic government, are not truly on our side. They don't see us as helping, and so they aren't helping us. Does anyone think that showing less restraint, being less selective about who we shoot at, is going to convince them to aid us?
You see the same thinking -- that having less restraint would have turned a loss into a Victory -- about Vietnam. But really the fundamental problem was the same -- when it came down to it, the people did not support us, they undermined us. We won every battle, but lost the war, simply because it wasn't the battles that were important. We could have "won" if we wiped out every village the VC had ever been seen near, just like we could "win" in Iraq if every time an IED blew up in a neighborhood and nobody told us who set it off we leveled the entire town. We'd absolutely never have the people's support, but we could "win" according to a goal post that has nothing to do with the reason our troops were there in the first place.
I think the key learning here is that there are types of conflicts where our military and our political reality make victory nigh impossible. We are not willing to wipe out whole populations in the name of "freeing" them, ergo we will fail in the face of any long-term insurgency that has a substantial degree of support among the populace. People who want to "win" by reducing restraint want to "win" by changing the name of the game from "free" to "wipe out". You could do that just to claim a victory, but that's like changing a losing game of Hearts into 52 Card Pickup -- you "win" by losing the real game even worse.
Re:On the inevitability of this being used against (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unsurprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Techno-bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... (Score:0, Insightful)
So? I would be happy to help the military create civilian technologies. Civilian technologies aren't going to kill anyone (except through misuse or accident). Even adapting military technology for civilian uses doesn't bother me. There's a big difference between adapting an originally negative technology to further humane society and subverting the ideals of freedom to kill. RMS obviously values the right to read and learn from source code. I don't think he'd disagree with everybody's intrinsic right to life.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
I do have a problem, though, with war profiteering. War is horrible, and profiting directly from the terrible suffering caused does create a moral conflict in my mind, especially because it creates the incentive to create more war and suffering. If our government wasn't packed to the gills with former defense contractors, would we be involved in fewer conflicts? I believe so.
From that standpoint, using Linux in a weapon system is a good thing. Some defense contractor didn't get paid billions of dollars to develop an embedded OS for that system. Oh sure they got paid billions for doing all the other parts of the contract, but that's one less way in which people profited directly from war. That's a long way from taking the profit out of the war, but since that wasn't the goal of Linux to begin with, I think all Linux developers can look at this as an unintended positive outcome.
Re:From the soldier's mouth: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that you mean "the customer". You see, a lot of defense appropriations is not intended to buy stuff that the warfighter wants. It is to buy stuff that the senator/representative wants, and the reason that he wants it is because the contractor that makes the particular part happens to reside in his voting district.
Re:That's disappointing? (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing I really missed during the game was oversight, not knowing the position of my teammates and the current status. Only turning your head to check could get you shot.
I believe the high-tech equipment would solve that, I can imagine this would save a lot of lives. As for the weight issues, I assume it will be solved in later versions.
I still can't say anything good about the American system of forcing civilians to fight a political war in a foreign country. Considering the amount of soldiers dying there I am extremely glad to live in a country where there is a volunteer army.
Re:The M-16/M4 vs AK-47/74 pissing contest... (Score:5, Insightful)
Put your self in a soldier's boot for a minute. Which is more important to you? Hit the threat when you fire, CQC to 400+ yards? Or to kick your rusty weapon and still be able to fire...but not hit anything? The first is what soldiers demand. The second is strictly for bragging rights. At the end of the day, it's the M16 that brings soldiers home and makes for high enemy body counts.
Now then, if you are not part of an organized army and you need your weapon to sit in a cache for months at a time without needing to clean it...suddenly the AK is a better option...but still not a better weapon. For real soldiers in real armies in real combat situations, the M16 is hard to beat. Now then, if you want to talk about modern replacements for the M16, the field is pretty wide.
In combat, every piece you carry has to serve YOU (Score:3, Insightful)
Every single piece, though, is there because YOU will need it. It will serve you to stay alive. It will kill your enemy, it will give you a chance to survive 'til help comes around in case you get shot, it enables you to call for help in the first place. Every piece has to be "worth" its weight.
8 pounds doesn't sound like a lot (hey, my laptop weighs more with ist case), but you don't just carry 8 pounds around. You carry that on top of the other stuff. As everyone who's into hiking will tell you, 8 pounds more or less carried over 30 miles means a sizable difference. Don't believe me? Try it. Take your laptop to work with you and walk that last mile. Then do it without. You WILL notice a difference, trust me!
So that equipment has to be "worth" those 8 pounds. Its value comes supposedly from additional information. Like what? Position of your buddies? You better know that anyway or what the hell are you doing there without proper training? A map? Nice to have, but useless in a firefight when you have better things to do than looking at a map. And maps weigh less. What's worse, either feature would distract you from what's happening right in front of you.
Even those amongst you who never had any military training will know that when they've been playing some shooter game with a built in map. Do you have time to ponder the directions on the on screen map when people are shooting at you?
What COULD be a leap ahead would be some kind of "target marker" that designates an identified hostile, not on some map but right on your visual arc. This in turn is near impossible.
So I can well see why soldiers aren't too happy with it. It means that they either have to leave 8 pounds of equipment they need behind or haul around 8 pounds more. And for what it seems, it's 8 pounds that don't really add to their efficiency in combat.
Possible solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The M-16/M4 vs AK-47/74 pissing contest... (Score:3, Insightful)
I really wasn't trying to turn it into one. The M16 is a decent weapon, so is the AK47. Which is "better" will depend entirely on the mission. We would actually dismount our M2s sometimes. Now that's a heavy pig to carry, even with three guys. (barrel, ammo, housing/tripod) Although I've toted some heavier firepower.
It's all about what you are trying to accomplish.
Re:Yeah... (Score:2, Insightful)
War in any time is horrible and it has always called upon the available technology of the day. We can not expect it to be any different in the 21st century! Technology is used to gain an advantage over the opponent and is today also being used to limit collateral damage (which I think is a good thing). Typically one of the fruits of war is the technological advancement that comes from technology being pushed to its limits. If it were not for WWII our world would very possibly be a different place today. The satellites that carry most of the worlds data, TV, and voice transmissions may not exist. Radar would not have been developed at the rate it had. The list goes on and on!
I know that this almost sounds hawkish. I assure you that I am not all that much of a hawk. I think our war in Iraq is an example of one of the poorest leadership examples ever set by a United States president! I don't feel quite the same about Afghanistan but still find myself wondering what good we are doing over there now. For the most part, I think we spend too much time sticking our military in other peoples business and would love to see most of our troops come home. Still, I am a realist. People will develop new weapons systems and find ways of improving the ones that we have. It comes as no big surprise to me that systems integrators have found their way into the combat zone. Why not? It really isn't very different from a technical standpoint than integrating a bunch of retail stores.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:5, Insightful)
My argument is not that one or another type of rifle is more or less suited for one or another task. My argument is that the furor over assault weapons is a manufactured hysteria. One can change an assault weapon into a perfectly legal one by changing the furniture on the weapon, which has little or nothing to do with its deadliness. and much to do with its scariness.
Again: The most dangerous component of a firearm is the person wielding it.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:2, Insightful)
Future weapon... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:From the developer's mouth: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm reading this.
I didn't work on BFT directly, but did write a lot of the code for the system it's built on (FBCB2). We saw the Land Warrior system in the early days and we knew it wouldn't fly. Nobody was really listening to us back then either.
Before you start your bad-ass kung fu shit choke move on me, let me point out a few things:
1. We (developers) don't get much of a choice *most* of the time on some of these projects. PHB's exist in the defense world just like they do in the Real World [tm].
2. We KNOW some of these systems are huge steaming turds. We don't like them either but we do what we can to make sure they work and are as useful and reliable as we can make them. You can afford to not sweat the details writing a game. You can't in real life.
3. We also operate under a fog of war. Information doesn't flow down to us most of the time. Decisions get made by higher ups and we hear about them sometimes days before we have to ship. We do a LOT of guessing on what YOU need and how YOU will use the system. It sucks but think about how bad they would be if we didn't.
4. We realize that lives depend on them working properly. I personally have had to work on code for fixes that were needed immediately out in the field (Afghanistan, initial Iraq invasion). We've pulled all nighters to get the patches out that were urgently needed for a mission.
For the rest of the slashdot crowd:
Yes, we run linux. Be grateful. We used to run SCO.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:5, Insightful)
You ask for something that doesn't have a short answer:
I agree, mass killing humans for profit and power is a bad thing. But on the other hand it is human nature. It is an extension of our older instincts to protect and expand our territory. More territory, more food, better chance for survival. The problem is, we don't really need to fight to expand anything any more. We're not likely to starve to death any more. So it is best that we try hard to keep this in check. However, going to war to defend ourselves is perfectly justifiable.
So Afghanistan is an easy one to address. From a 'noble' point of view, we know that their government didn't respect basic human decency and freedoms for one. They sanctioned killing women for things like trying to get an education, reading books, or showing their face in public. From a defensive point of view, the Taliban (the ruling government of Afghanistan at the time) also didn't respect international protocols and basic understandings in that they sheltered a terrorist group (Al Quaida) even after that group admitted to the terrorist attacks against the United States which killed close to 3000 civilians (including other foreign nationals... about 200 Canadians among them). Not only did the Taliban refuse to give up the culprits, they refused to take any actions to punish or even curb their activities. This in itself can be seen as an implicit declaration of war. Limiting the ability of a foreign rogue nation to perpetrate or allow to perpetrate mass killing is a very valid reason for being there. At the same time, schools (real schools not fanatic religious schools for boys only) are now operating again, and basic human rights are returning in a limited way. Maybe not what you want, but certainly better then they were under the Taliban. You might also note, that some of the most active elements fighting NATO in Afghanistan are Arabs, not Afghanis. This is because the Arabs that are there (and not all Arabs in general) are mostly members of Al Quaida who want a return to Afghanistan of a system that allowed them to practise and organize their terrorist activities unchecked. You are very naive if you think dialogue would have changed anything in Afghanistan. Mind you, politicians are naive if they think it will be easy to effect any permanent change there. How do you get rid of a couple millennia worth of warlord mentality?
On the other hand, I already said I didn't agree with the Iraq campaign. It was not really necessary at the time (Hussein's posturing was not really a threat), and draws too many resources away from Afghanistan which was really justifiable. And to top it, they did a piss poor job executing the invasion. Instead of the surge now, they should have had two or three times the troops in the first place; to replace the police that would go missing after an invasion, to guard the weapons/ammunition dumps of the former Iraqi army (which weren't guarded... hence all of the dumps' contents disappeared thus the amount of IEDs), to make sure militias and civil war didn't happen (Saddam was the only reason they didn't have a civil ware before... just like Tito in Yugoslavia... once he was gone, unless there was another iron fist, boom, the country goes up in smoke). Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld really did run the war like a business process. The bare minimum to do the job to keep costs down. Then crow about how successful they were while neglecting the fact that the after implementation support issues were never really thought out since most busines managers all seem to have a 'Pollyanna' attitude. This doesn't mean I don't feel for the troops on the ground who have to deal with the bad decisions of their leaders. And I don't expect them all to agree with me about their leaders either BTW.
On the other hand, Hussein really was a bloody tyrant and his sons were just animals, pure and simple. But maybe that is what it took to maintain the peace there. Anyway, I'm never really sorry to see these kinds of people done in. Personall
Re:The M-16/M4 vs AK-47/74 pissing contest... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Russians said that about Afganistan too - and found the enemy had both more weapons training and more combat experience. Also consider that the broad focus of training over a fairly short time in the US military is likely to mean that guys that only drilled a lot to shoot things are going to be more accurate with the same sorts of weapons. The thing that makes the Taliban frightening is they have spent their entire lives at war and they ran an entire country along the lines they had learned in the brutal refugee camps where they grew up.
US Army: I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as night operations go, the only thing I wish we could get is a set of nods that aren't as long as a toilet paper tube and don't look like you're looking through one. If we could have nods that covered both eyes like a pair of PVS-15's and were only 0.5-1 inch long I would be ecstatic.
Soldiers don't like the Land Warrior setup because it sucks. It's big, heavy, unreliable, battery powered (which means you need to carry spares) and distracts from the real threats to our soldiers, i.e. suicide bombers, snipers, and IED's. You need all your senses to find these before they find you, and having a display in your eye telling you where your buddies are and what the ambient temperature is just distracts you from the things that are actually important.
Situational awareness is exactly what suffers here. You may know where people are and what their heart rate is, but you don't realize that the guy over there isn't holding a video camera, he's holding an rpg.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:3, Insightful)
Except they aren't. Your comment only makes sense, even tongue-in-cheek, if you consider those who live and work in close physical proximity to these "urban criminals" of yours, criminal themselves. And what could be behind such an attitude, I wonder? Hmm?
Good grief, you're disgusting.
Hear hear! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree wholeheartedly. If we put one quarter as much money towards obtaining better (i.e. lighter, flexible) body armor, boots, and rifles, not to mention nods (the PVS-14's are what, 10 years old?), we'd be in much better shape.
I already hump 65 lbs or so before I even put my ruck on; don't give me even more crap to carry that isn't going to help in 95% of the situations I will face. Seeing around corners with my weaponsight is cool, but it's not cool when the weaponsight is bigger than a thermal scope and heavier to boot. Not to mention the ridiculous wire connecting me to my weapon. I'd rather carry a thermal scope, at least they can see through walls.
Not to mention the fact that any current model of heads up display will get guys killed. Try doing any kind of CQB with that ridiculous stuff on your head. If you have live opponents you'll find yourself dead pretty quickly. It gets in the way and distracts you. Not to mention the fact that the real threats we face on a day to day basis are from things that require our complete attention to detect: IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers. I don't want to be distracted by the view from my gun's sight or my buddy's heart rate when I'm scanning. Scanning is how a soldier survives. If you're looking for the guy who's on mid-cycle leave from Iraq or Afghanistan, just find the guy who's moving his head and eyes constantly scanning and who gets tense and stops talking in large crowds. We don't need this crap distracting us from our jobs.
Give me the stuff that will actually help. Why does the 5.56 coming out of my personal weapon punch little tiny holes in people at 150 meters when it should make great big ones? Maybe we should fix that instead of spending umpteen billion dollars in order to attach a video camera to my helmet, which is already too freaking heavy. Why does my rifle malfunction if I don't treat it like a beloved little sister and baby it every 6 hours or so? Better rifle technology has been available for a decade at least. why don't I have it? Because we are spending our money jacking off the military contractors.
Hear hear.
Re:you don't say? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I was ever to find myself in close-combat where I was engaging a bunch of enemy combatants in a kill-or-be-killed situation, I'd want full possession of ALL my senses. Having my buddies voices buzzing away in my ears would be the first thing I'd want to shut off.
The human body and it's capabilities are the products of millions of years of evolution and refinement. This kit is just a few years old. Personally I'd rather trust what nature gave me.
Re:On the inevitability of this being used against (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, because additional systems designed to lock out users never cause actual problems in the field...
Re:you don't say? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. And I never even implied it was. The discussion was on whether categories of firearms are sufficiently different that we might make a legal distinction in how they are treated. The answer to that question is unequivocally yes. Whether we need or want to make those distinctions is up for debate. My feeling is we should.
Luckily nothing has changed in 200 years.
People going on shooting rampages is terrible, but a statistically insignificant effect. However gun crime on the whole is absolutely relevent to the discussion of whether and how the populace should be armed. It is not the whole story, but if you insist it is not part of the story, you are a moron. Self defense is another important issue, and protection from tyrannical regimes is a factor, if somewhat theoretical in modern America. Protection from invaiding forces, as in a well regulated militia, is a nice idea, though I think we have that covered pretty well. The practicality of trying to get guns away from would-be criminals rather than merely taking them from honest civillians is another thing we have to deal with. Gun safety and training. The list goes on.
Re:Just Like The M16 (Score:4, Insightful)
The united states didn't care when britain came calling. Come 911, suddenly things tightened up.
Does this mean that the united states implicitly declared war on england, only to renounce it after 911?
This is gonna suck. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Insightful)
A lesson most of us with military backgrounds learned from Vietnam. Somehow the current administration didn't get the memo though.