ZoneOne
08-13-2004, 02:53 PM
FUTURE WARRIOR: New Concepts for Uniform Systems
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What does the future hold for Soldier uniform systems? How about heads-up displays, the ability to cyberchat at all times, and a total weight of less than half of the current uniform? A recent exhibition takes a glimpse of the road ahead.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior1.jpg
A mannequin, on display at the Future Warrior exhibit, shows off the upper torso of the 2010 Future Force Warrior uniform system. The helmet has a drop-down eyewear device, so the Soldier can view an online computer (Photo by Phil Copeland).
Article By Phil Copeland
American Forces Press Service
The Army's future soldier will resemble something out of a science fiction movie, as members of Congress witnessed at a recent demonstration on Capitol Hill.
The newest concepts for lightweight, lethal uniform systems to be worn by the future soldiers in battle were displayed at the Russell Senate Building in Washington.
Two uniform systems are under development. The Future Force Warrior system will be available for fielding to soldiers in 2010. The Vision 2020 Future Warrior system, which will follow on the concept of the 2010 Future Force Warrior system, is scheduled to be ready 10 years later.
The two new uniform systems are being developed under the Future Combat System Program. "This Army initiative will develop and demonstrate revolutionary capabilities for the future soldiers in battle," said Jean-Louis "Dutch" DeGay, a Soldier Systems Center representative.
The new systems include a weapon, head-to-toe individual protection, onboard computer network, soldier-worn power sources, and enhanced human performance.
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010.
"The 2010 Future Force Warrior system will meet the more immediate, short-term demands of our fighting warriors in the battle space, while the 2020 model will remind you of an ominous creature out of a science fiction movie," DeGay said. He added that the system will leverage all the technologies and lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq carry large amounts of external weight, often 120 pounds or more, to be battle-ready. DeGay said the new uniform system -- from head to toe -- weighs 50 pounds.
The body armor of the new uniforms will absorb the shock of a bullet much better than current bulletproof vests. "The hard body armor has been stood off of the body by 2˝ to 3 inches, so when the soldier is shot, the force is more evenly distributed to decrease injuries such as broken ribs," DeGay described.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior4.jpg
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Raoul Lopez (left) poses in the new 2020 Future Warrior uniform system, while Army Sgt. Dan Harshman dons the 2010 Future Force Warrior uniform system (Photo by Phil Copeland).
Soldiers will be able to chat online with each other while they are walking down a jungle trail. The new system has the ability for each soldier to be tied into tactical local and wide-area networks with an onboard computer that sits at the base of the soldier's back. "We essentially call the 2010 soldier an 'F- 16 on legs' because it gives the soldier the same capabilities as they would normally have on aircraft and other platforms," DeGay explained. The F-16 is an Air Force fighter jet.
Soldiers will also be able to share data with vehicles, aircraft and other individual soldiers. "If an Apache helicopter was deployed forward and recorded real-time video of the enemy, the helicopter can send the video back to an individual soldier to observe," he said, with obvious enthusiasm and excitement for the new uniform system.
As has been seen in science-fiction movies, a dropdown piece of eyewear from the helmet allows the soldier to see a 17-inch computer screen displaying anything relayed to the soldier. "This eyewear device is see-through, so it hangs out in space," DeGay said. This allows soldiers to take in all supporting data while keeping both hands on their weapons.
Soldiers wearing the new system will have no need for an external microphone to communicate. "The helmet has sensors that register vibrations of the cranial cavity so I don't have to have a microphone in my mouth. That allows the soldier to control the entire computer via voice-activation," DeGay explained. Soldiers will be able to cycle through onboard menus via their eyewear device.
The onboard computer will monitor soldiers' overall physiological picture of how they are performing in the battle zone. "Warrior Physiological Status Monitoring System gives the soldier's body core temperature, skin temperature, heart rate, whether the soldier is standing or ****e, and how much water the soldier has drunk," DeGay said.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior2.jpg
Snapshot view of a computer screen Soldiers will see in a dropdown eyewear device attached to their helmets. This particular screen view shows the Soldier's physiological status , allowing a medic in the field to monitor the Soldier's health status (Photo by Phil Copeland).
A medic, who can be miles away, will now be able to diagnose and treat a soldier who is about to have sunstroke, without even physically seeing the soldier. "So a medic can see how the soldier's core body temperature is rising (and) heart rate is falling, and the soldier then knows to go directly to the medic for treatment," DeGay said. "The computer will drop down a map to direct the soldier where to find the medic for help."
He pointed out that with the new system commanders will be able to consider each soldier, aircraft and vehicle as part of a node of a tactical network that shares data with each other, sending and receiving data inside the battle space.
The second uniform system, the Vision 2020 Future Warrior concept, will follow the 2010 Future Force Warrior with more advanced nanotechnology. Nanotechnology deals with the creation of incredibly small materials, devices or systems with a scaled-down size of 100 nanometers or less. A nanometer is a metric measurement equivalent to one billionth of a meter.
"If we were in Detroit, the 2020 Future Warrior system would be the concept car. It leverages a lot of the nano-work being done by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology," DeGay said, noting the Army just awarded MIT a five- year, $50 million program to establish the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
Think about a good action movie that shows an average person walking down a street with a nice designer suit. All of a sudden, gunshots are heard and just before a bullet hits this person, his soft fabric suit transforms into an incredible display of alien armor that deflects bullets. If Natick engineers are successful, this movie will become a reality in the future U.S. Army.
"What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."
A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out.
Another potential development is inserting "nanomuscle fibers" that can actually simulate muscles, giving soldiers more strength. Fabric is impregnated with nanomachines that create the same weight, lift and feel as a muscle. "So I coat the outside of the armor with a nanomuscle fiber that gives me 25 to 35 percent better lifting capability," DeGay explained.
The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."
The Future Force Warrior is the Army's short-term change, with a complete rebuild of the soldier from skin out being planned through the Future Warrior system. "We are already starting to look at the 2020 Future Warrior concept, which is integrating stuff that is just starting to show promise in the lab," DeGay concluded. He said researchers hope to see this developing technology mature in the next 15 to 20 years. "Future Warrior is a visionary concept of how the individual warrior may be equipped in the 2015-2020 timeframe," he said.
Reality Check:
Ice hockey can teach you a lot about combat. It's fast and furious, you need to be a team player if you want to win, and to excel at it (or at least not get your clock cleaned), you need good situational awareness. While the gear hockey players use is made from modern materials, the sticks, pads, and skates are pretty much the same low-tech items they've always been. Combat is much the same way. The tools Soldiers use in combat should be rugged, reliable, effective, and above all, simple to operate. A weapon that takes 30 seconds to get into firing configuration is not a weapon, it's an albatross.
So is the 2010 Future Force Warrior program an albatross? It's well-intentioned and well- meaning, but is it an albatross?
For example, incorporating better body armor into the soldier's kit is a good idea, but adding 2˝-3 inches of stand-off space between the armor and the soldier increases the overall cross-sectional width of the body by 5 or 6 inches, which is 5 or 6 inches higher than you'd like to be when you're low crawling to cover in the middle of a firefight.
Information is power, and nowhere is this truer than on the battlefield, where the ability to communicate clearly and rapidly pass on information spells the difference between survival and death. But "chatting online while on foot patrol in the jungle"? Patrols are silent affairs, governed by the "do as I do" principle (stop when the guy in front stops, lie down when he lies down, etc.). Information is passed up and down the file using hand and arm signals, not text messages. Giving each soldier a hands-free, heads-up display is a novel idea (and if it comes with a map display that would be brilliant), but if you're in a combat situation, will you be of much use if your eyes and brain are focused on watching Apache gun camera footage on that cool 17" virtual display?
The ability to remotely monitor an individual's physiological condition is also a good thing if you're an astronaut on your way to the Moon, but a Soldier doesn't need a computer to tell him if he's hot, thirsty, or hasn't had any sleep, much less whether or not if he's standing up or lying down. The whole idea of the platoon medic doing a daily foot inspection is that he can use that time to physically assess each individual's overall state, not just count the little piggies going to market.
The current infantryman carries as much as 120 pounds of "stuff" with him into combat. Reducing this to 50 pounds would literally give people the ability to jump for joy, but where will all this weight be shaved from? Combat soldiers carry what they need to fight and survive in combat: body armor and helmet, weapons, ammunition, radio, night vision, food, water, and a change of socks (with the big ticket items being the guns, ammo, and armor.) Unless we invent a remarkable new, tough, lightweight material any time soon, the big ticket items are going to remain as heavy as ever, not to mention that "F-16 like" computer, and the soldier-worn power source (and the soldier-worn batteries that go with it) that will add weight to the soldier's load of… "stuff."
Combat is never going to be simple or easy; the technology we develop for Soldiers should focus on making them more effective in combat, and free them from unnecessary distractions. While the 2010 Future Force Warrior program offers some interesting ideas for improving soldier efficiency, it remains to be seen, once the system makes its way out of the theoretical laboratory and onto the real world battlefield, whether these systems will help bring him home or help get him killed.
As for the Vision 2020 Future Warrior, no thanks, I choose the blue pill…
-- Eric Daniel, Military.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What does the future hold for Soldier uniform systems? How about heads-up displays, the ability to cyberchat at all times, and a total weight of less than half of the current uniform? A recent exhibition takes a glimpse of the road ahead.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior1.jpg
A mannequin, on display at the Future Warrior exhibit, shows off the upper torso of the 2010 Future Force Warrior uniform system. The helmet has a drop-down eyewear device, so the Soldier can view an online computer (Photo by Phil Copeland).
Article By Phil Copeland
American Forces Press Service
The Army's future soldier will resemble something out of a science fiction movie, as members of Congress witnessed at a recent demonstration on Capitol Hill.
The newest concepts for lightweight, lethal uniform systems to be worn by the future soldiers in battle were displayed at the Russell Senate Building in Washington.
Two uniform systems are under development. The Future Force Warrior system will be available for fielding to soldiers in 2010. The Vision 2020 Future Warrior system, which will follow on the concept of the 2010 Future Force Warrior system, is scheduled to be ready 10 years later.
The two new uniform systems are being developed under the Future Combat System Program. "This Army initiative will develop and demonstrate revolutionary capabilities for the future soldiers in battle," said Jean-Louis "Dutch" DeGay, a Soldier Systems Center representative.
The new systems include a weapon, head-to-toe individual protection, onboard computer network, soldier-worn power sources, and enhanced human performance.
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010.
"The 2010 Future Force Warrior system will meet the more immediate, short-term demands of our fighting warriors in the battle space, while the 2020 model will remind you of an ominous creature out of a science fiction movie," DeGay said. He added that the system will leverage all the technologies and lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq carry large amounts of external weight, often 120 pounds or more, to be battle-ready. DeGay said the new uniform system -- from head to toe -- weighs 50 pounds.
The body armor of the new uniforms will absorb the shock of a bullet much better than current bulletproof vests. "The hard body armor has been stood off of the body by 2˝ to 3 inches, so when the soldier is shot, the force is more evenly distributed to decrease injuries such as broken ribs," DeGay described.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior4.jpg
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Raoul Lopez (left) poses in the new 2020 Future Warrior uniform system, while Army Sgt. Dan Harshman dons the 2010 Future Force Warrior uniform system (Photo by Phil Copeland).
Soldiers will be able to chat online with each other while they are walking down a jungle trail. The new system has the ability for each soldier to be tied into tactical local and wide-area networks with an onboard computer that sits at the base of the soldier's back. "We essentially call the 2010 soldier an 'F- 16 on legs' because it gives the soldier the same capabilities as they would normally have on aircraft and other platforms," DeGay explained. The F-16 is an Air Force fighter jet.
Soldiers will also be able to share data with vehicles, aircraft and other individual soldiers. "If an Apache helicopter was deployed forward and recorded real-time video of the enemy, the helicopter can send the video back to an individual soldier to observe," he said, with obvious enthusiasm and excitement for the new uniform system.
As has been seen in science-fiction movies, a dropdown piece of eyewear from the helmet allows the soldier to see a 17-inch computer screen displaying anything relayed to the soldier. "This eyewear device is see-through, so it hangs out in space," DeGay said. This allows soldiers to take in all supporting data while keeping both hands on their weapons.
Soldiers wearing the new system will have no need for an external microphone to communicate. "The helmet has sensors that register vibrations of the cranial cavity so I don't have to have a microphone in my mouth. That allows the soldier to control the entire computer via voice-activation," DeGay explained. Soldiers will be able to cycle through onboard menus via their eyewear device.
The onboard computer will monitor soldiers' overall physiological picture of how they are performing in the battle zone. "Warrior Physiological Status Monitoring System gives the soldier's body core temperature, skin temperature, heart rate, whether the soldier is standing or ****e, and how much water the soldier has drunk," DeGay said.
http://www.military.com/pics/SoldierTech_Warrior2.jpg
Snapshot view of a computer screen Soldiers will see in a dropdown eyewear device attached to their helmets. This particular screen view shows the Soldier's physiological status , allowing a medic in the field to monitor the Soldier's health status (Photo by Phil Copeland).
A medic, who can be miles away, will now be able to diagnose and treat a soldier who is about to have sunstroke, without even physically seeing the soldier. "So a medic can see how the soldier's core body temperature is rising (and) heart rate is falling, and the soldier then knows to go directly to the medic for treatment," DeGay said. "The computer will drop down a map to direct the soldier where to find the medic for help."
He pointed out that with the new system commanders will be able to consider each soldier, aircraft and vehicle as part of a node of a tactical network that shares data with each other, sending and receiving data inside the battle space.
The second uniform system, the Vision 2020 Future Warrior concept, will follow the 2010 Future Force Warrior with more advanced nanotechnology. Nanotechnology deals with the creation of incredibly small materials, devices or systems with a scaled-down size of 100 nanometers or less. A nanometer is a metric measurement equivalent to one billionth of a meter.
"If we were in Detroit, the 2020 Future Warrior system would be the concept car. It leverages a lot of the nano-work being done by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology," DeGay said, noting the Army just awarded MIT a five- year, $50 million program to establish the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
Think about a good action movie that shows an average person walking down a street with a nice designer suit. All of a sudden, gunshots are heard and just before a bullet hits this person, his soft fabric suit transforms into an incredible display of alien armor that deflects bullets. If Natick engineers are successful, this movie will become a reality in the future U.S. Army.
"What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."
A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out.
Another potential development is inserting "nanomuscle fibers" that can actually simulate muscles, giving soldiers more strength. Fabric is impregnated with nanomachines that create the same weight, lift and feel as a muscle. "So I coat the outside of the armor with a nanomuscle fiber that gives me 25 to 35 percent better lifting capability," DeGay explained.
The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."
The Future Force Warrior is the Army's short-term change, with a complete rebuild of the soldier from skin out being planned through the Future Warrior system. "We are already starting to look at the 2020 Future Warrior concept, which is integrating stuff that is just starting to show promise in the lab," DeGay concluded. He said researchers hope to see this developing technology mature in the next 15 to 20 years. "Future Warrior is a visionary concept of how the individual warrior may be equipped in the 2015-2020 timeframe," he said.
Reality Check:
Ice hockey can teach you a lot about combat. It's fast and furious, you need to be a team player if you want to win, and to excel at it (or at least not get your clock cleaned), you need good situational awareness. While the gear hockey players use is made from modern materials, the sticks, pads, and skates are pretty much the same low-tech items they've always been. Combat is much the same way. The tools Soldiers use in combat should be rugged, reliable, effective, and above all, simple to operate. A weapon that takes 30 seconds to get into firing configuration is not a weapon, it's an albatross.
So is the 2010 Future Force Warrior program an albatross? It's well-intentioned and well- meaning, but is it an albatross?
For example, incorporating better body armor into the soldier's kit is a good idea, but adding 2˝-3 inches of stand-off space between the armor and the soldier increases the overall cross-sectional width of the body by 5 or 6 inches, which is 5 or 6 inches higher than you'd like to be when you're low crawling to cover in the middle of a firefight.
Information is power, and nowhere is this truer than on the battlefield, where the ability to communicate clearly and rapidly pass on information spells the difference between survival and death. But "chatting online while on foot patrol in the jungle"? Patrols are silent affairs, governed by the "do as I do" principle (stop when the guy in front stops, lie down when he lies down, etc.). Information is passed up and down the file using hand and arm signals, not text messages. Giving each soldier a hands-free, heads-up display is a novel idea (and if it comes with a map display that would be brilliant), but if you're in a combat situation, will you be of much use if your eyes and brain are focused on watching Apache gun camera footage on that cool 17" virtual display?
The ability to remotely monitor an individual's physiological condition is also a good thing if you're an astronaut on your way to the Moon, but a Soldier doesn't need a computer to tell him if he's hot, thirsty, or hasn't had any sleep, much less whether or not if he's standing up or lying down. The whole idea of the platoon medic doing a daily foot inspection is that he can use that time to physically assess each individual's overall state, not just count the little piggies going to market.
The current infantryman carries as much as 120 pounds of "stuff" with him into combat. Reducing this to 50 pounds would literally give people the ability to jump for joy, but where will all this weight be shaved from? Combat soldiers carry what they need to fight and survive in combat: body armor and helmet, weapons, ammunition, radio, night vision, food, water, and a change of socks (with the big ticket items being the guns, ammo, and armor.) Unless we invent a remarkable new, tough, lightweight material any time soon, the big ticket items are going to remain as heavy as ever, not to mention that "F-16 like" computer, and the soldier-worn power source (and the soldier-worn batteries that go with it) that will add weight to the soldier's load of… "stuff."
Combat is never going to be simple or easy; the technology we develop for Soldiers should focus on making them more effective in combat, and free them from unnecessary distractions. While the 2010 Future Force Warrior program offers some interesting ideas for improving soldier efficiency, it remains to be seen, once the system makes its way out of the theoretical laboratory and onto the real world battlefield, whether these systems will help bring him home or help get him killed.
As for the Vision 2020 Future Warrior, no thanks, I choose the blue pill…
-- Eric Daniel, Military.com