'Guaranteed hit' tech could be added to army’s next-gen squad weapon
military.com
military.com
The same technology that makes for beautiful eye-detection autofocus in portraits can also make for efficient slaughter of those designated to die.
We must each choose the world in which we wish to live.
I'm not sure there's a killing technology so exacting and guaranteed as to change the fundamental behaviour of these enemies.
Though maybe I'm wrong and there is some magic bullet out there that will change modern warfighing.
The next major conflict will have episodes that emulate some of the battles of World War One, where machine guns and chemical weapons utterly massacred those who were unprepared to face them. Imagine a 1990s-era armored column beset by a few thousand drones with small shaped charges -- it would be an attack without countermeasure; utterly confusing and over in minutes.
A true major conflict would be annihilation and utter devastation across the globe.
Imagine a nuclear war between US and USSR, which were on the brink of it several times.
For simplicity, let's consider that 100% of populations of both countries, and half of Western Europe's, get killed in the war. This makes, roughly, 150M + 300M + 150M = 600M. With world population being around 6000M at the time of the demise of the USSR, that would make 10% of world population. Hardly a complete devastation.
Much harder consequences would be the climate impact ("nuclear winter"; its original prognosis was reviewed since 1980s, it should be less severe), and radiation pollution (which, as we know from e.g. Chernobyl, is nasty but not immediately deadly after some time).
Of course, the world has enough nukes to kill the entire population, but likely only if carefully planned for it, unlike any even remotely realistic conflict scenario.
if it came to this, the other countries would be forcibly dragged into the conflict - it's a "with us, or against us" sort of deal.
You'd expect only a handful of countries can remain neutral (most of which are in a strategically irrelevant location, like new zealand).
A nuclear exchange would be really bad, but a lot, in absolute terms, of people will survive the initial exchanges.
funny you mention cameras - I was thinking about "subject tracking autofocus" as I was skimming that article. A large-scale non-nuclear war (is that even possible) in modern times would be pretty nasty
I’m not clear where the boundary is between “war” and other events involving large numbers of deliberate fatalities where the goals involve changing governance or borders.
That said, considering recent tech developments and looking at the cost of each part separately, I won’t be surprised if the next decade gives us a genocidal conspiracy where a hundred people kill a million with self-made remote controlled or autonomous weapons.
An Army study found that in Afghanistan, >50% of all engagements happen at a distance of greater than 500m. This is the reason for all the current work to extend the range of the average infantryman. A case could be made that some of that work is overspecializing for conditions that might not reoccur in future wars. For example, Pentagon is currently pushing hard for replacing the 5.56 with a 6.8 cartridge that is more powerful than the 7.62 NATO. That would make for a nice sniping round, but maybe not the best when kicking in doors and suppressing people close by?
I'm pretty sure you could put a weight at the end of the barrel with some actuators in it to drive the barrel the MOA changes necessary to center on a spot.
Combat and swat raids have little in common with video games.
I doubt it's integrated at this time but it would also allow for a workflow to authorize shots (and of course record the whole thing).
To put this another way: training a sniper is really hard and expensive. However, it's not the marksmanship that's the hard part. It's the camouflage, field-craft, spotting, intelligence gathering, and tactics to integrate into the rest of the unit that are the difficult things to teach.
>What we need to improve is proper target identification,
Assuming the rifles are networked with each other then it only takes one source of target information and the whole squad will be aware of potential targets. (e.g. someone marks a target, a drone spots a target -> the targets are shown on all rifles)
>coordination and tracking of friendlies
The rifle should be capable of detecting other soldiers that are in the rifle network.
The reality is, we evolved to be pretty efficient social predators. Attempts to augment our natural ways of acting in crisis need to be really well matched to innate ways of thinking to be useful.
Think about it this way. When driving around with your GPS, music, and passengers and you encounter something distressing like being lost or seeing a complicated traffic situation up ahead that induces a moment of panic, the natural response is to cut away all the crap and limit the flow of information through you to the absolutely most essential. It's quite possible that it may be nearly impossible to do that with augmented reality systems like you are describing.
Basically this has been the pipe dream of all armies, once bolt action rifles matured, and all the way up through WWII.
If you don't, you're as useful as a battleship in WWII (not very).
Capital ships like Carriers can't be everywhere at once, and there were a lot of WWII engagements involving cruisers, destroyers, and smaller craft. So, what is the difference between a cruiser and a battleship? Basically scale.
This "guaranteed hit" tech basically tries to solve the trigger pull and flinch problems. It might be quite useful if it could be scaled down to handgun size in a red-dot like form factor.
This "capability" sounds somewhat contrary to the purpose of suppressing fire.
Mount this system on a relatively small, silent drone. (There's two more problems to solve, right there, however.) That would be relevant to outdoor recon.
This device would not have helped me getting ambushed within 100yards or being the first guy in the door on a raid.
Not what "this device" is meant to address.
I refuse to work on anything that compromises my morality so that includes your case, gambling sites, user tracking (and advertising platforms) and particularly weapons systems etc.
Note: I have no issue with people who do, it's not on me to judge them.
Modern general usage aside, it's always meant 'overwhelmingly impressive' rather than 'good'.
It's all coming, the question is who gets it first and how accurate it is.
If you think about it rationally, this is actually not a bad thing. As MAD shows, if there is a potential for armed conflict, it's better from the casualty standpoint if one or both of the sides have overwhelming firepower. Then either the weaker side, or both sides will choose not to engage because the "victory", even if achievable, would come at too high a cost.
The only real problem I see with this is if this tech makes its way to the "bad" folks, like ISIS. When any idiot can somewhat reliably hit targets a mile out, things get problematic.
Another interesting thing about this is that with today's science and technology I could cobble a pretty good version of what I described together in less than a year, hardware and all, for under a million dollars (assuming I already have multispectral dataset, if not, add another million). Which tells me that pretty much every even somewhat developed nation state already has their own version.
That, or they don't because target identification and having authorization to fire are not problems that will be so easily solved.
We generally try to avoid friendly fire. The device you described sounds like an indiscriminate killing machine. There's a reason we gave up area-denial weapons like mines. They kill indiscriminately and create huge political problems that mean you can win a battle and lose the war.
(And if you're running out of ammo, you'd need to add more mines too)
A gun is already an indiscriminate killing machine. Having an 'only pewpew when on target' setting doesn't change this.
Now, using this tech to set up an automated sentry turret is another matter (and something I'm still flabbergasted isn't commonplace, given the number of people in any developed nation with the skills and resources to build one in their shed.)
And in this case there's no "indiscriminate killing machine", because soldier pulls the trigger - the weapon does not fire on its own. And that's the way it ought to be.
>Not even faces, _any_ part of a human. Butt sticks out from a shallow trench? Butt gets shot off. And it won't be limited to visible spectrum either, so it could largely "ignore" camo. And it could be augmented by similar AI-based person detection from a drone.
These two statements don't seem to reconcile. The second one has major things wrong with every single statement there.
>Soldiers in the field do not receive "authorization" for every shot they fire.
You might be surprised. For one, on just how detailed the rules of engagement for a particular operation can be. For two, outside of imminent threats, there's also quite a bit of direct authorization going on. Especially for sniper teams.
I don't see why you'd think that. Just because the scope highlights everything you can shoot doesn't mean that it will fire the weapon. We are not (yet) at the levels of accuracy where such decisions could be made by a machine, except for area denial.
Maybe for competition shooters or something, but they'd be banned in competition. It just doesn't make sense.
A not-that-effective one, even sometimes when the users are highly trained. It seems to be a form-factor problem, and the mechanism has to do with trigger pull and flinch. (And more generally, people acting funny in the heat of combat.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
In no world will even a scaled-down version of this probably ever be worth humping around the extra bulk and weight and introducing complicated maintenance and reliability issues.
That's tautological. If it's too heavy and not reliable enough, then it's tech not worth putting on the battlefield. The question is if it can be made light and reliable enough.
The same question once faced autoloaders, sidearm pistols, revolvers, holo/red dot sights, magnified optics, and even firearms themselves. The answer is universally, when it's ready, it can be useful in certain contexts.
For militarized police which do fast action like SWAT the battery problem is not a thing anymore.
Gundam is the only answer.
Our future is getting mortgaged in more ways than one.
World's military spendings are $1.8T/year. NATO is $1T/year. The U.S. is $0.6T/year. As per U.N. estimates, $0.3T per year is sufficient to stabilize CO2 levels.
But no, instead of defending what really needs to be defended, the choice is to spend on the useless technology, like illustrated in this article.
What a waste.
Like, the term 'arms race' got popularized to describe this exact situation. I'm not even arguing against the technology described here, but just more cynical about the ultimate effects
Unfortunately that big stick also induces a desire to use it.
What happens when the person in charge is insane? Or, worse, unethical? Or, even worse, Dunning–Kruger? How would we police ourselves then‽
It seems reasonable to imagine spies and hackers trying to acquire the models from sights so that, on the day of actual battle, their soldiers can be given carefully prepared masks that defeat the sights of the enemy etc.
Much easier to simply obscure or mask whatever features the model detects.
Only soon enough everyone has it.
Every dollar towards tech like that is effectively R&D for every regime on Earth.
A lot more of who survived just spent the whole war walking and doing maneuvers.
See also: movies where the final confrontation with a villain requires hand to hand combat because all the ranged weapons have been misplaced. Shooting enemy soldiers at long distance before they're even aware of the danger is great in actual warfare but audiences don't want actual warfare.
Here's the big difference between actual combat footage and movies/tv. In movies/tv you have to have the actors in well-framed shots, well-lit, recognizable, and distinguishable against the background. On actual battlefields in recent times, doing this sort of thing often gets you dead in about 3 seconds.
Contrast this with my impression of watching some actual outdoor combat helmet-cam footage: People start yelling they're taking fire, then take cover. The enemy is something like 150 yards away or more, and would only appear as a tiny figure or a speck on a TV screen, but only if you actually spotted them and you don't even get to poke your head up to look for too long, if at all. You might be able to distinguish smoke or flashes in the distance, though. A few minutes later, air support is called in, and there's an even bigger puff of smoke out there.
There are times where you can clearly see everybody and they're well lit, not moving chaotically. That's when you watch a team operating anti-tank guided missiles against tanks or other targets. There's a lot of distance separating the attackers from their targets. You hear the missile launch and watch it close the distance to the target over a period of several seconds. The targets might start to scatter a couple of seconds before the missile arrives if they can hear it, or remain completely unawares until the explosion. It's very easy to see what is happening but it also looks very "unheroic."
As far as infantry soldiers never missing, maybe. It's also likely that soon there won't be much human infantry. We might still be far useful autonomous robots, but I don't think we're that far from remote controlled humanoid robots with guns on them.
* Adventure Fiction/Space Opera - The technology and science are secondary to the plot, which is often very grandiose, much like operas and horse operas that were popular at the time (the root of the latter name).
* Gadget Fiction - The technology/science and the struggle of the inventor to create/discover/explain it are the source of the conflict in the story.
* Social Science Fiction - The effect of the technology/science on society is the source of the conflict in the story.
Star Wars is a 1 and 3 type of story, though you could hone in a bit more and say, for example, that Episode IV is also gadget fiction given the focus on the Death Star.
War wouldn't look glamorous if 4 out of 5 soldiers die a "glorious" death from artillery fire from 20 kilometres away.
Analogously, WWIII will likely be about thousands of soldiers being vaporised by atomic weapons, and blown to pieces by drones flown by men sitting in comfy bunkers on the other side of the globe
Analogously, WWIII will likely be about hundreds of millions of civilians being vaporized by atomic weapons.
There are about 14,000 nuclear weapons in existence. If we assume all of them are 300kt weapons (overly approximate), then each one has a maximum fireball area (i.e., region where people would be vaporized) of about 1.12 km². Allowing for a population density of 20,000 people per km², which is enough to make you one of the top 50 densest cities if held city-wide, this allows for about 300 million people to be possibly vaporized as an upper limit.
Trying to track down the actual count of nuclear weapons by their various sizes has proven to be nontrivial, but given that the size class I used accounts for only ½ the US's active nuclear weapons, the other ½ being on the 100kt scale (which produces ⅓ the blast area, apparently), and given that the US makes up about half the world's nuclear weapons, the area that can be targeted by ranges is definitely a wild overestimate.
Factor in that densely-populated slums are not going to rank high on anyone's nuke list, and that coverage to maximize number vaporized, as opposed to number killed, is not likely, and I seriously doubt that it's possible to see 100 million people vaporized by atomic weapons in any war.
If two great powers wage total war with today's most destructive weapons, there won't be enough surviving people and infrastructure left to develop a next generation of even more destructive weapons.
And as far as I remember, in previous war nuclear weapon was used against civilians. Targeting large cities with high population density would be the most effective usage.
Sure, most of the action is still close combat, but they don't totally neglect the remote killing.
And of course SG never really explained why they weren't using Landies and Humvees