Soldiers of the Future
Here's a post from Strategy Page about a concept the US military called Land Warrior, for making US ground forces more high tech. It caught my eye because a lot of the concepts in Land Warrior are remarkably similar to an idea I arrived at for the Cassandra Kresnov Series. I called it tac-net.
Tac-net is essentially a series of elaborate software programs that integrate all battlefield units, enabling them all to operate off the same page. It's a highly encrypted network that works as an 'information sponge', absorbing every available piece of information from every available source, and forming it into a single battlefield overview that is redisseminated out to every combatant, giving them instant situational awareness. Of course, my soldiers are operating five hundred years from now, have radically advanced processing power and neural uplinks that feed the information directly into their brains... but from the Strategy Page article, it looks like the military's working on a more basic version right now, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
Tac-net loves information. From soldiers' GPS data, it knows to within a few meters where every tank, helicopter and infantryman is on the battlefield. It can then cross-reference this with visual-recognition software, taking feeds from small cameras on vehicles, or on soldiers' helmets or rifle-scopes. It recognises features from satellite scans of the terrain (in a long war in Afghanistan or Iraq, I don't doubt they've made topographical maps down to the finest detail) a road here, a field there, a patch of trees... figures distances, cross-references them from the feeds from other sources, and from there is able to pinpoint everyone's location down to the millimeter. Everyone knows, in real time, exactly where everyone else is. This is excellent if you don't want your own guys to shoot you -- an all too-common occurrence even on modern battlefields.
It also gathers information on the enemy. If visual recognition software spots an enemy combatant, it highlights the location on the map, so that everyone can see -- not just the one guy who spotted him (the Strategy Page article says Land Warrior maps are viewed projected onto an eyepiece. Obviously officers would spend more time looking at maps than anyone else -- lower ranks being too busy shooting at people). If a target is sighted, then disappears, tacnet could change that 'blip's' colour, so soldiers know it's a 'last sighted location'. Extra feeds from UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), satellites, manned recon aircraft, etc would all be integrated together to add to the picture. If anyone IDs an enemy, or an unidentified, everyone on tac-net immediately knows about it, without a need for time-consuming, and sometimes confusing radio communications warning about the bad guy behind the next wall.
This tactical picture is integrated further into individual soldiers' targeting sights. Rifles carry laser-sighters, not necessarily to help soldiers to aim (most well trained infantry are pretty crack shots without that stuff) but to let tac-net know what you're shooting at. If you highlight a friendly, immediately it squawks at you. If it has any information on something else you highlight, it'll immediately show you on the eyepiece display. Also, I guess audio-recognition software is going places these days too -- if soldiers identify things about the enemy tac-net doesn't already know, and say so within range of a microphone, tac-net will hear and make further updates. If you wanted to get really fancy, I'd guess tac-net could triangulate the position of unseen gunmen by listening to the sound of gunfire from one location, cross-referencing that against the same gunshot from another location, then figuring out where the shots came from based on the known location of both microphones against the constant of the speed of sound.
When you have instant situational awareness, the possibilities are endless. If it knows the position of gunmen (although obviously it can only know what some source has actually identified) then tac-net could display danger zones, or 'kill zones' that would appear as a red haze across a patch of empty air. For example, it if knows for certain there's a sniper on a particular rooftop, it can calculate every spot on the topographical map that the sniper could theoretically hit. If a soldier comes close to one, tac-net will let him know, and show him where the fire-shadow is so he can stay out of sight. Here of course is where it becomes problematic for combat vets -- it reaches a point where it starts telling you how to fight. Obviously experienced vets will find that annoying -- being a vet is about being able to judge relative risks from experience, and no vet wants a software program thinking it knows better. Vets will turn those settings way down, while inexperienced soldiers will turn them up, and hopefully be saved from fatal rookie mistakes (standing in the wrong spot with a sniper around, for example).
I'm sure hundreds of additional applications would come to light once it began to be used, and feedback from soldiers would be crucial. But I'd reckon it would become a 'soldiers' system', something that is constantly upgraded according to their feedback, and is flexible enough for each of them to use according to their own preferences. Probably the military would end up giving it some military-esque concept name like a 'knowledge multiplier' or whatever. It just seems to me that the biggest battlefield conundrum yet to be solved by modern technology is something that allows the average soldier to know what the hell's going on, and to make sure that his knowledge of what the hell's going on is the same as every other guy's.
Tac-net is essentially a series of elaborate software programs that integrate all battlefield units, enabling them all to operate off the same page. It's a highly encrypted network that works as an 'information sponge', absorbing every available piece of information from every available source, and forming it into a single battlefield overview that is redisseminated out to every combatant, giving them instant situational awareness. Of course, my soldiers are operating five hundred years from now, have radically advanced processing power and neural uplinks that feed the information directly into their brains... but from the Strategy Page article, it looks like the military's working on a more basic version right now, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
Tac-net loves information. From soldiers' GPS data, it knows to within a few meters where every tank, helicopter and infantryman is on the battlefield. It can then cross-reference this with visual-recognition software, taking feeds from small cameras on vehicles, or on soldiers' helmets or rifle-scopes. It recognises features from satellite scans of the terrain (in a long war in Afghanistan or Iraq, I don't doubt they've made topographical maps down to the finest detail) a road here, a field there, a patch of trees... figures distances, cross-references them from the feeds from other sources, and from there is able to pinpoint everyone's location down to the millimeter. Everyone knows, in real time, exactly where everyone else is. This is excellent if you don't want your own guys to shoot you -- an all too-common occurrence even on modern battlefields.
It also gathers information on the enemy. If visual recognition software spots an enemy combatant, it highlights the location on the map, so that everyone can see -- not just the one guy who spotted him (the Strategy Page article says Land Warrior maps are viewed projected onto an eyepiece. Obviously officers would spend more time looking at maps than anyone else -- lower ranks being too busy shooting at people). If a target is sighted, then disappears, tacnet could change that 'blip's' colour, so soldiers know it's a 'last sighted location'. Extra feeds from UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), satellites, manned recon aircraft, etc would all be integrated together to add to the picture. If anyone IDs an enemy, or an unidentified, everyone on tac-net immediately knows about it, without a need for time-consuming, and sometimes confusing radio communications warning about the bad guy behind the next wall.
This tactical picture is integrated further into individual soldiers' targeting sights. Rifles carry laser-sighters, not necessarily to help soldiers to aim (most well trained infantry are pretty crack shots without that stuff) but to let tac-net know what you're shooting at. If you highlight a friendly, immediately it squawks at you. If it has any information on something else you highlight, it'll immediately show you on the eyepiece display. Also, I guess audio-recognition software is going places these days too -- if soldiers identify things about the enemy tac-net doesn't already know, and say so within range of a microphone, tac-net will hear and make further updates. If you wanted to get really fancy, I'd guess tac-net could triangulate the position of unseen gunmen by listening to the sound of gunfire from one location, cross-referencing that against the same gunshot from another location, then figuring out where the shots came from based on the known location of both microphones against the constant of the speed of sound.
When you have instant situational awareness, the possibilities are endless. If it knows the position of gunmen (although obviously it can only know what some source has actually identified) then tac-net could display danger zones, or 'kill zones' that would appear as a red haze across a patch of empty air. For example, it if knows for certain there's a sniper on a particular rooftop, it can calculate every spot on the topographical map that the sniper could theoretically hit. If a soldier comes close to one, tac-net will let him know, and show him where the fire-shadow is so he can stay out of sight. Here of course is where it becomes problematic for combat vets -- it reaches a point where it starts telling you how to fight. Obviously experienced vets will find that annoying -- being a vet is about being able to judge relative risks from experience, and no vet wants a software program thinking it knows better. Vets will turn those settings way down, while inexperienced soldiers will turn them up, and hopefully be saved from fatal rookie mistakes (standing in the wrong spot with a sniper around, for example).
I'm sure hundreds of additional applications would come to light once it began to be used, and feedback from soldiers would be crucial. But I'd reckon it would become a 'soldiers' system', something that is constantly upgraded according to their feedback, and is flexible enough for each of them to use according to their own preferences. Probably the military would end up giving it some military-esque concept name like a 'knowledge multiplier' or whatever. It just seems to me that the biggest battlefield conundrum yet to be solved by modern technology is something that allows the average soldier to know what the hell's going on, and to make sure that his knowledge of what the hell's going on is the same as every other guy's.
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