Predicting the Nature of War in 2034

July 27, 2004

[Centurion2000]

Some thoughts on warfare in 2034.

Rail gun snipers, vehicle machine guns and tank weapons
EMP devices
Complete battlefield situational awareness extended down to the infantryman (smart helmets)
Personal Fuel air explosives for urban conflicts
Powered combat armor (special units)
Completely sealed batlefield dress
Personal reconnaisance drones

Nanotech
Personal trauma nanbots
Personal bllodstream air supply
Personal reconnaisance
Personal augmentation systems (strength, endurance)

UCAV vehicles with full air to air and air to ground capability
Orbital based kinetic kill vehicles
Autonomous hunter killer armor and low level air vehicles.
Robotic Infantry

[Centurion2000]

In 1996 hackers cracked sites and systems at the DOD, Justice Department, the CIA, and NASA.

Correct, and I accept your premise that static systems have been hit, but has hacking ever influenced a battlefield situation on mobile networked devices ?

Perhaps that would be a better question.

Especially considering the time that hackers require against encryption, strategic and backfield systems can be successfully attacked.

I highly doubt that a networked army with changing encryption codes will be compromised in a tactical environment.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

In use by whom? Future historical trends do not look good for the RKBA. How is a citizen's militia with their privately owned arms to make much of a dent in the Imperial Storm Trooper infantry of 2034?

[Cannoneer No. 4]

O'Dwyer VLe handgun

[Centurion2000]

How is a citizen's militia with their privately owned arms to make much of a dent in the Imperial Storm Trooper infantry of 2034?

Assymetrical Warfare : first use private arms to take police weapons, then hit isolated military targets.

Failing that, the best way to stop the StormTroopers will be killing politicians (after all, they hold the leash)

[Modernman]

Wow. That might be the first time I've seen Space Marines on a FR thread.

I was always partial to Imperial Guard, myself.

[headsonpikes]

Shush! It's 'not time', yet.

[Modernman]

hat picture just goes to show how inhuman our enemies are, forcing a cutie like that to wear all those baggy concealing cloths. ;)

You know, not to go OT or anything, but the Iranian girls I've known in LA and around DC and NY are pretty much uniformly stunning.

[300winmag]

Well, I could make do with the rifle. For everything else, I'd have to hit a good sporting goods/camping store.

[Little Ray]

Git their support echelons. Can you imagine what sort of tail a Power Armor platoon is going to need?

As it stands, an "insurgent" is pretty stupid if he takes a shot at an M1A Abrams. But shooting the fuel truck or mechanics is a pretty good trick and almost as effective.

[VaBthang4]

You said: "A 'networked army' is very vulnerable to terrorists."

I asked you for specific details.

You provided a list of hackers hacking into 'government' computers. Desktop computers, websites, IBM Servers at the Pentagon are not part of a networked army.

The concept is one of networking air, land and sea units in combat so that they can share information about the battlespace with each other.

The connections back to the DoD and the actual commanders does not run through a LAN line and flow to some Dell computer running Widows XP! Haha...Geez.

[IGOTMINE]

Yep. Gotta agreed. Catherine Bell, call your answering service please! I just left you another message.

[gilliam]

Sorry you find it a light matter. No matter. I have limited knowledge and what little I know I can't share. Just rest assured that people in the Pentagon have thought out these issues. Still, we have thought out issues in the past and the enemy is also thinking them out. It really doesn't pay to be too cocky.

[HitmanLV]

I took a tour of Cyberdyne at Universal Studios, it was really 'SUPER!'

[coydog]

Hey, neat picture! Australian outfit, I presume?

[LexBaird]

Complete battlefield situational awareness extended down to the infantryman (smart helmets)

What happens when Mr. Terrorist gets ahold of a smart helmet from a recently KIA soldier, and suddenly knows where every good guy is hiding?

[Khurkris]

"an infantryman who was about nine feet tall, who could march cross-country at tank speed, for about a hundred miles, dash into battle beside the tank, carry several days to a weeks worth of food and ammunition, and be almost self-supporting in the field.
they have a different breed of bacteria in their intestines, which allows them to digest browse, like a deer, instead of needing good quality grass. Simply put, they can live and prosper where a larger horse would starve.
In order to be able to live on forage, the animal has to be raised from weaning to adulthood on rough forage."

...uhh...you called?

[American in Israel]

So? In a battle, they'd both get shot down easily enough.

In battle, the computers reject those targets as ground clutter. In the days of smart bombs, it is smarter to not get in the cross hairs in the first place.

A funny thing about kevalar, you can't blow a hole in it with a .44 mag, but you can stick a knife right through it. So a guy with a spear wearing kevalar on a horse is of more danger to a guy in a foxhole with an M16 than visa-versa. Just re-picture the pajama parade over the hill towards ya at midnight, only this time they are on horses and are bullet proof.

Nasty.

[Modernman]

What happens when Mr. Terrorist gets ahold of a smart helmet from a recently KIA soldier, and suddenly knows where every good guy is hiding?

I would imagine that it would be fairly easy to build safeguards in to such a system so that you use biometric information to ensure that only authorized users can access the information.

[LexBaird]

And I would imagine that any system can be hacked. If I were a battlefield commander, I would be highly concerned about having the position of every asset being broadcast to every other asset. It would give me great flexibility and situational awareness, but at the risk of being compromised every time a soldier, truck, or position was captured.

Countermeasures to smartsuit tech off the top of my head:

Spoof the enemy IFF transponders to disguise yourself as a friendly.
Flood the theater with false signals and jamming.
Counterfeit feeds going back to enemy HQ to give false data.
Tap into the enemy info feed and read their positions.
Blind them with an EMP to fry their smartsuit electronics.
Take out their comsats at a critical time.
Introduce a virus into their software.
Develop signal detectors that pinpoint where individual feedback signals are originating from.