Land Warrior - RL Lag for soldiers!

[spacemanc]

From :

Land Warrior 15lb soldier-smartphone kit lives on | The Register

The US Army's wearable-tech rig for foot soldiers, known as Land Warrior, was officially cancelled by the Pentagon last year. Nonetheless, a single US infantry battalion took the kit to war in Iraq, and Land Warrior has some strong backing on Capitol Hill. Now, reports have it that the programme has won some further funding and a small new lease of life.

According to trade mag Inside Defense (subscription only) the US Army's 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team has requested 1,000 sets of Land Warrior, and this has been granted. Until now, the only American combat unit with Land Warrior has been the 4th battalion, 9th US Infantry.

The 4th of the 9th had been issued with Land Warrior and trained up on it when the project was cancelled, in large part due to some fairly damning reviews from 4/9th soldiers. But then the battalion got sent to Iraq at short notice as part of America's troop "surge" before the kit could be withdrawn.

A full set of Land Warrior includes a helmet-mounted monocle display and combat-harness human-interface device linked to a central computer based on a 400MHz ARM processor. It has GPS, and a camera with 12x zoom mounted on the barrel of the soldier's M4 carbine. This has been said by programme officials to "make every soldier a marksman" and also to be very handy for shooting (or just looking) around corners.

Most significantly of all, Land Warrior soldiers are linked up by a voice and data radio network. This lets their bosses know where they are, and can help a lot with avoiding friendly-fire incidents and suchlike. There is said to be a noticeable time lag before the map updates, however, so an individual soldier doesn't usually find it useful for such jobs as knowing if his squadmates are on the other side of a wall. It's more in the "is it safe to fire artillery into that grid reference" or "are there friendlies in that city block" league.

The other big difference between Land Warrior and (say) a modern converged smartphone with most of the same capabilities built around a similar processor, is that the military gear is about 50 times heavier. A full Land Warrior rig weighs 15lb, which is pretty much unacceptable to a soldier laden with weapons, ammo, water and body armour.

But, according to Wired magazine's defence editor Noah Shachtman, who visited the 4/9th in Iraq last year, the American soldiers have managed to find uses for Land Warrior, and some of them have become fans. The apparently entirely useless gun-cam has been discarded, and normally the rest of the gear is carried only by leaders of each four-man team.

The 4/9th have found Land Warrior useful for virtually marking buildings as searched, so that effort isn't wasted and locations don't get missed in house-to-house sweeps. They've also found it handy for marking objectives and routes, sometimes on the fly in mid-operation.

Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington last year effectively overruled the Army's cancellation order, saying that Land Warrior should still get $80m of funding. The senators seemed to feel that the Army wasn't really serious about buying kit which might help ordinary soldiers fighing real wars. (It is true, most big armies prefer to regard counterinsurgency work as some kind of aberration, not what they should really train and equip themselves for.)

In any case, it would appear that the 4/9th have found parts of Land Warrior useful enough to keep. Now one of the US Army's new and trendy Stryker brigades will try it out. There may be life in the new dog yet.

Meanwhile, the UK's very similar FIST project grinds almost silently on, quietly pouring out some £2bn to reinvent various American (or civilian smartphone) wheels here in Blighty. Perhaps by 2015, our £14k-salary infantrymen - themselves nowadays increasingly produced in South Africa, Nepal, Fiji and other places overseas - may be wearing £70,000 UK-made Land Warrior lookalikes. ®

"No can do - Im getting laggggggg!" - I cant help wonder what ping theyre getting!

[spacemanc]

PS before the PR trolls roll along and say this is old news/what is the point of this - I added it because I thought there was a bit of new info on Land Warrior/FIST

[Liquid_Cow]

Originally Posted by spacemanc

The other big difference between Land Warrior and (say) a modern converged smartphone with most of the same capabilities built around a similar processor, is that the military gear is about 50 times heavier. A full Land Warrior rig weighs 15lb, which is pretty much unacceptable to a soldier laden with weapons, ammo, water and body armour.[/b]

Take one of those lighter smart phones, stick it in the pocket of a hot sweaty dusty grunt who's going to dive to the ground at least a dozen times each day, landing right on the phone half the time, wading through an open sewer at least every other day, expect it to go 4 days w/o recharging, and occationally use it as a forceable entry tool, how to you think that iPhone will hold up?

Eventually Land Warrior will become part of the military. Already troops are testing LW 2.0, which greatly reduces the weight while increasing the usablilty of the system based on feedback from 4/9 and other units who've tested it.

The military percurement system is painfully slow, in part because everything must be properly tested in the most extreme conditions, this results in a lag in technology reaching the front lines. When I was in I owned a PC with 1M of RAM and a 40M HD, it was a cutting edge computer, one of the first generation of 386 machines. The computer which ran the airplane I was working on had 1K of RAM, used a tape drive, and was the most powerful computer flying at the time.

People bitch about friendly fire, and how its so unacceptible that someone like Pat Tillman was killed by his own squad, yet they are not willing to give the military the technology which would have prevented this very accident.

[Harrod200]

I wonder, if today's media presence existed back then, how many military technological innovations from WW2 might have gone down differently. The entire point of prototyping and field tests is to work out exactly these sort of bugs. I'm sure that when the first of the new version of LW is deployed, there will be many improvements over the current one, and soldiers will find more bugs to work out of it. That is how technology advances.

There is no better catalyst for technological advancement than war. In 20 years tops, these systems will be a fraction of their current size and available to everyone as an integrated system, far more advanced and useful than the gadgets bolted onto these phones.

[spacemanc]

I agree that the requirements of the military are massivly different from that of a smartphone user - but 15lb? I would have thought there would have been weight limit set before they even started devlopment.
A question for those of you that may know more about it. I read that LW cost £250 million to develop ( seems cheap ) but the MOD is splashing out £2 billion on FIST. Per soldier costs are £ 15000 for LW and £ 70000 for FIST ( Maybe this includes development costs? )
Is this the usual MOD procurment fiasco ( another bowman ) or is there more behind the figures than that?

[Liquid_Cow]

Originally Posted by Harrod200

I wonder, if today's media presence existed back then, how many military technological innovations from WW2 might have gone down differently.

Oh boy...

[rant]
Never mind the tech developments, can you imagine how the war would have gone had Tom Brokaw been reporting on the D-Day invation?

"That's right Sam, we just got word that another C-47 has been shot down bringing the total dead to over 3000, this in the first hour of the so called 'Operation Overlord' The question now is how long will President Roosevelt support the obviously incompetent General Eisenhower and his poorly planned invation of German Normandy. We now go to Berlin where one of our reporters is live with German Chancellor Hitler with his reaction to this latest blatant viloation of his country's sovernty."

BTW, 108,000 died in Operation Overlord (couting allies, axis, and civilians).

You are so right on all your points Harrod. I read a great quote in Time magazine recently from a Marine who was being questioned about the Osprey and the risks to the troops flying in it. I'm paraphrasing but His reaction was along the lines of 'Look, people are going to die in this machine. Flying is dangerous, VTOL is even more so. This is a completely new way to fly, much like the Harrier (which 1/3 of which have crashed since being built), a lot of them are going to crash. The Osprey may not be the answer to the problem we are trying to solve, but what comes next will be, and it will be inlarge part to the experiences gained flying the Osprey.'

The Osprey is a great plane, its only had 5 actual crashes in its development 4 were fatal, yet I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people who will read this line will say "no way, that thing's a death trap, there have been all kinds of crashes" and they will say that because they have been brain washed by the media (which hates the military in general, and really dislikes the Osprey for some reason). The F-14 crashed on its 2nd flight, the F-117 had at least 4 crashes in its development, yet they were both developed into great aircraft without the meddling of the media.

On your last note, about war being a catalyist for development, I am an EMT and I just got trained on a new "hemostatic" treatment to stop bleeding in the field which was developed specifically for treating troops in Iraq. Its all around us.

[/rant]

[PFunk]

I'm pretty sure theres a difference between the news coverage of WW2 and basically everything since. For one Since WW2 there hasn't been any real official 'total war' state declared which would let the government institute war measures which would include real censorship and actually recruiting the news for propaganda purposes.

That and people actually were actually behind WW2, whatever your feelings on the world today. Plus maybe people wouldn't be so pessimistic if damned Dick Cheney didn't keep lying. Last throws my ass. The intel had to be getting a bit better by then since '03.

As for death traps like the Osprey... well yea it is a death trap. #1 its a military aircraft doing hard difficult maneuvers that no other craft can do. Dangerous. #2 Anyone recall the early cold war x planes? I don't cause I'm too young but its well known that those aircraft that lead the way for modern uncrashable jetfighters were the most dangerous rides on the earth practically.

[fludblud]

Originally Posted by PFunk

As for death traps like the Osprey... well yea it is a death trap. #1 its a military aircraft doing hard difficult maneuvers that no other craft can do. Dangerous. #2 Anyone recall the early cold war x planes? I don't cause I'm too young but its well known that those aircraft that lead the way for modern uncrashable jetfighters were the most dangerous rides on the earth practically.

so what?

risks have to be taken if anything is to be done, cancelling entire programmes and spreading widespread sensationalist media terror just because a person was killed while testing out something new simply restricts the drive for innovation and puts you at a disadvantage.