U.S. Army to integrate power cables into a tactical vest | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Army to integrate power cables into a tactical vest

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As a former armor officer, I worry that integrating tech in the warrior kit is a complacency risk; not a problem, just a risk. For example, tank platoons rely heavily on communication devices, and when those fail, I believe teams have not trained hard enough on the analog (hand and arm signals, flagging, IR signaling, etc.). If you power communication and AR from a cable, does the soldier now carry battery backups? Does the soldier now train to two levels of contingency: digital, radio, physical? The soldiers kit is heavy enough and we barely train to one contingency so the ROI here is really important—and I don’t mean money.

This is more of a risk-reward trade off that comes with anything that is more performant but more sophisticated. The same can be said about guns, but obviously the reward of having a gun is vastly greater than the risk of it malfunctioning.

But on this same point, the military favors very simple firearms for good reason: they don't malfunction nearly as often, and are robust enough to survive very harsh conditions without much change in firing characteristics. A good analogy is to website availability: if you run a personal blog, it doesn't matter if your uptime is ~100% or 80%. If you run a remote monitoring site for a power grid however... You don't gain anything if you lose reliability. See the F-35 JST for a good case in point.

What makes you think the military favors simple firearms? American forces use small arms that require a fairly high degree of service compared to alternatives like the ak-47/akm variants. It's not a problem because the maintenance requirements can be adequately accomplished by a single disciplined soldier and the performance gains over simpler alternatives are substantial.

Because I've used them. The most complicated firearm the average grunt will use is an M249, which has fewer moving parts than many handguns. Production inertia and poor accuracy keep the AK series out of the US armed forces, along with a preference to 5.56 over 7.62. Basic maintenance for an M16 is nearly identical for an AK-47, the M16 is lighter and has smaller/lighter ammunition, and has better mid-range and long-range accuracy. So let's say that there is a very slow curve to complexity vs convenience up to a certain point. But we have been using the M16 since the 60's; plenty of newer, more complex rifles have come out in that time, many with better range, accuracy, stopping power, cyclic rate, etc... But we haven't moved away from a simple, fairly reliable rifle.

Did the widespread adoption of GPS in the military cause a degradation in orienteering & map-reading skills?

Yes.

Absolutely. As a concrete example, the US Navy stopped teaching celestial navigation and have only recently begun to teach it again.

They now have a skill gap of mid-seniority navigators who have no astro-nav experience and will struggle under GPS denial.

How many people on the boat do you need that know celestial navigation? Sounds like something you could have someone go to school for to specialize in and then make sure you've got at least one on every boat rather than make everyone learn. We've got plenty of ways to defeat jamming, the newest block of GPS satellites have ways to increase signal power in certain areas and anti-radiation missiles can blow up a jammer. GPS only comes from space so it's pretty easy to find someone on the ground messing with it. We also have things like star trackers that are used on satellites to determine position without GPS that could easily be implemented on a boat if not already on there. These systems could be hardened against EMPs and only brought out in case of absolute emergency. I don't see the need of every navigator having their own sextant.

How many people on the boat do you need that know celestial navigation?

Easy. The same number that know how to use a GPS. Your one guy may be the first casualty.

We've got plenty of ways to defeat jamming, the newest block of GPS satellites have ways to increase signal power in certain areas and anti-radiation missiles can blow up a jammer.

What do you do when your enemy dumps a load of sand in orbit?

GPS isn’t in low earth orbit it’s in a very high orbit so it shouldn’t be vulnerable to either asat missiles or space junk clogging up its orbit

I don't think it was ever the case that everybody on board was taught astronav. It's very much a thing that's taught to the people who need to be able to calculate where the ship is.

That's about 4 or 5 people on a typical warship, and then you can add to that pool the number of people who did hold a job that required the skill but have since been promoted.

Widespread adoption of GPS in aviation has absolutely harmed pilotage and map-reading skills (including my own).

Others can speak for the military, but among civilians, it seems almost nobody learns orienteering anymore.

I only have anecdata, but the last several times I've been on remote camping trips, I've taught folks the basics myself. And a relative's son, a Boy Scout, was told by his troop leader that the Orienteering merit badge was obsolete, don't worry about it.

100%

There were recent exercises in the Baltics where US forces were exposed to learnings from the Ukraine conflict. Very different than fighting ISIS.

Turns out GPS jammers, proper drones, etc. can wreak havoc. The IDF got smoked in Lebanon for the same reason, the game has changed. Well prepared state-level adversaries are not the same as militias in pickup trucks and SVBIEDs.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/02/army-study-173rd-a...

"The common thread running through the paper is the challenge posed by Russia’s jammers and other electronic warfare tools.

An enemy equipped with these “could effectively neutralize a GPS system from 50 miles away using one-fifth the power of a tactical radio,” the report estimates, so “we should assume that GPS will be either unavailable or unreliable for the duration of the conflict if the [brigade] faces a near-peer threat or sophisticated non-state actors.” "

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/03/06/...

As former enlisted 91A, dont worry about it! I remember being used to putting up with all kinds of absolutely shit ideas from command and this ones no different. We didnt even have functioning body and vehicle armor in the last conflict. Spare parts took months to get if they ever showed up at all. Batteries were either left in the sun in crates until they popped, quit charging after a week or so due to the heat, or the chargers broke down.

So if ive got a buddy who needs wiring for the antenna array on the back of an HMMV or if im short on power cables for something, the first thing im going to do is find a few legs who hate their vests. those little connectors with the boots on them look real sturdy too, and im sure those cables wont be missed by guys who havent had the ammunition or the battery packs to fire those space age senator kickbacks for months.

Start improving the army at the parts of it that arent sexy. Supply chain, and the VA system.

>> For example, tank platoons rely heavily on communication devices, and when those fail, I believe teams have not trained hard enough on the analog (hand and arm signals, flagging, IR signaling, etc.).

That's the change in the modern military. Having the communication system fail is the equivalent of having the main gun fail: you are no longer an effective fighter. The communication system should protected, hardened, and as reliable in combat as a soldier's rifle.

Air forces are at the front of this. There are countless mission-critical information systems for which there is no 'analogue' option. If the bomber doesn't have a data link with the spotter on the ground, the bombs are not dropped. If the IFF system on the helicopter isn't working, there is no takeoff. Technology is no longer a "nice to have" but an essential part of warfighting.

Former Marine officer, disagree here that this is the change in the modern military. What you are describing is a major weakness of that type of air support.

Fighting certainly doesn't stop because you can't get comms with the bird. You just lose that as on option to deploy.

I think what gets abstracted away when people think about military operations is that it's not a chess board back at the Pentagon. They only are accomplished by physical deployment of force. You always plan for the back up contingencies because the mission still needs to get done if all the systems aren't online.

Long hard experience has taught us the way you make operations resilient is always know how to fall back on a physical signal like popping a smoke or sending up a flare.

--Perhaps that take is a bit too simplistic, so take it with a grain of salt from a ground combat element guy. I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.

>> I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.

Ya. Air Force and Navy are defined by their widgets. If the aircraft cannot fly, the air force cannot air force. If the ships don't float, the navy doesn't navy. That's the cultural difference. The army has trouble dealing with 100% reliance on anything. For pilots and sailors such reliance comes natually.

If the ships don't float, the navy doesn't navy.

But if the radio doesn’t work the Navy even today can fall back to light signals or even semaphore or flag codes. That’s the point, there isn’t just reliability, there is also redundancy.

If the tanks cannot tank, the army can’t army against a near-peer enemy either...

Are you trying to suggest that a ship without BVR comm is in any way, shape, or form an effective warfighting asset? Take away radios, radar, and satcomm and that ship just became nothing more than the USS Target.

> The communication system should protected, hardened, and as reliable in combat as a soldier's rifle.

And how are you going to archieve this?

> when those fail

Then make them not fail. If it's as important as a rifle, you make sure the failure rate is as low as possible/acceptable, right?

>> IVAS is a Microsoft-designed heads-up display that functions as a fight-rehearse-train system, among other roles.

So... no invasions on patch tuesday? In all seriousness, I'm in the military myself and therefore have to use microsoft software products (outlook, windows, edge etc) every day. When they work they work, but every few weeks something just gives up the ghost. A patch, a new config .. some thing is changed an I have to spend an entire morning hammering away in config windows before I can continue my real job. The concept of a mircosoft-powered weapon or tactical information system is scary.

This was my chief complaint working in a military intel shop. It's insane trusting their products in highly critical situations. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to use a radar workstation that ran on Linux. Everything worked, could do dynamic operations right from the terminal, it was so sweet!

I've been in those areas too. What drove me nutz is not being able to automate things. I've spent days doing something by hand that, if I were on a less-restricted system, I could do in literally seconds in a terminal interface. Want to convert a movie file from one resolution to another? "ffmpeg -input -output" No. You have to use a video encoder from 1995 that only outputs into avi, doesn't understand modern audio formats and can only extract screenshots from reference frames.

Yeah, the amount of data entry I had to do by hand was killer. I eventually got a Linux laptop cleared, set up scripts to scrape data and generate briefings, documents, formatted images. My productivity went up so much (a week's worth of work in a couple hours) that my command started an investigation to see if I was siphoning off my work load to other shops. When they figured out I was just automating everything, they shut it down because the "software was not government approved" lol. So much for military intelligence...

Similar anecdotes could be made for Linux or just about any technology under the sun. Have you seen some of the code for embedded Linux drivers? It can get downright nasty.

Every day anyone turns on a Windows machine they roll the dice. Maybe it works. Maybe a security patch was applied last night that borked the firewall. Maybe today you are checking the leave system to see which offices are free so you can borrow thier machines. Linux machines aren't like that. Errors happen but they don't generally just stop working. When you have a faulty linux machine you get the sense that it is at least trying to work. It feeds you data about what is wrong. It throws errors, list everything it has done or hadn't done, and defaults to some sort of backup mode.

A windows/microsoft system just stops. You get a generic error notice, a insulting "click to diagnose" option, and it is up to you to figure our why Outlook is no longer accepting calender events from some other system that, until now, it has been playing nice with for years. (My issue yesturday.) That is IF it even admits there was an error. Often it will just not work but fail to tell you that anything is amiss until you get a note from your CO that you missed a meeting because reasons.

No, it's different with windows. Linux doesn't have constant forced patches from the mothership that kill your system. It can happen but it's much rarer. Windows used to be better of course (back when i worked there, even though I didn't work on that part ;-)). It's staggering how bad windows maintenance is now.

Have you met my friend Ubunto 20.04?

touche

Anybody else reminded of the dot-com era popular item (fad?): The SCOTTeVEST

(googling shows they are still around).

Power cables (although i don't think the original actually had cables, it did have channels for the cables to run through), data cables, multiple pockets. I wanted one until I saw the price tag.

To me it looks like it belongs on the “Land Warrior” (remember that?)

All that Land Warrior tech is pretty much available now in the form of a small PAN that includes a radio, android tablet, and headset. Additional sensors like cameras can hook into the radio to give live video to a command center. The radio battery can run everything or the soldier can wear a larger battery. Everything hooks up through what is basically a USB hub combined with an ethernet switch.

Here is an example of a setup: https://cdn.glenair.com/star-pan/img/star-pan-vi-capability-...

SCOTTeVEST is still around and has a small but loyal following. Personally, I find their jackets very handy but I never pretended to be anything other than a massive nerd.

I've run a couple of H4D Lean Start Up based activities on the problem around the carriage of batteries/power by light infantry dismounted patrols.

As a light infantry guy myself, it's a significant problem for an already weight burdened dismounted force.

I think it's going to require a fundamental rethink on just-in-time logistics as well as learning how to think like an insurance actuary.

I wonder if a study has ever been done on what is carried but never/rarely used on patrols and carried mostly for insurance purposes.

Surely there's room for factual, data driven machine learning here to trump feelings based load burdening.

This isn't really anything new. When I was in from 2005-2012, I used a cord antenna for my MBITR and weaved it into my kit. The biggest thing to make sure is that you don't interfere with the quick release mechanism.

They also mention having a "Conformal Wearable Battery". That sounds pretty dangerous, considering there's a lot of ways to get punctures out in the field.

People are working on batteries that don't have that problem [1].

[1]: https://www.jhuapl.edu/PressRelease/191014

LiFePO4 chemistry is also dramatically safer and is available today. Downside is it's less energy capacity, but for wearable applications it's a lot safer.

https://www.batteryspace.com/LiFePO4/LiFeMnPO4-Batteries.asp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery...

I got curious about that battery too and found the below datasheet. I don't know what tricks they're pulling to be "ballistic/penetration safe", but I really like the idea of a flexible, wearable battery. I hadn't realized products like it already existed.

https://inventuspower.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Inventu...

Soldiers routinely carry things that are designed to explode; getting a round into a wearable battery sounds dangerous, but still less than getting a round into one of your grenades.

If it's designed to be worn under some body armor, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Grenades are designed to explode only after the pin is pulled. That's a little different than getting a nick in your battery and suddenly looking like a LiveLeak vape fail video writ large. That being said, there's plenty of work being done on batteries that aren't also incendiary devices waiting for their moment to shine.

You're probably right, I think I took a bad example with the grenades.

My point was that your risk tolerance is very different when your job description literally involves getting shot at.

I was more referring to the pinch points between plates and general wear. I.e. you trip and fall onto your side and it punches through

Current batteries can be dangerous if punctured, that's true. Maybe we'll see those replaced by solid-state batteries once we figure out how to scale the manufacturing process and bring the cost down.

Dweeb:

"I know, so like, let's put a big chunk of lithium on the outside of the armor so it lights on fire when hit. Also if we integrate it into the armor it's harder to take off!"

Soldier:

"Yo FNG, take that out and put it in your ruck if you don't want to become Mr. Human torch the next time a kid throws a rock at you."

In 5-10 years, I feel like every soldier will be a carrying around a lithium ion battery pack to power their HUDs, ARs, and their communication devices. Let’s hope those puncture proof lithium ion batteries increase their reliability.

Shouldn't we skip directly to wireless charging?

I assume all the hardware they want to hook up is ultimately being powered by a battery. wireless power delivery is significantly less efficient than wired. it's not enough to matter when you're drawing from mains, but probably a big deal when you're drawing from a battery that soldiers have to lug around in the field.

Aside of the excellent points raised by leetcrew in sibling post, there's also the matter of avoiding spurious EM emissions.

Wireless charging sounds like creating a bright, pulsating "soldiers be hiding here" beacon for any opposing force.

Most likely a beacon for mines and IEDs

Was a pretty common argument against "smart passports" doesn't matter if the stored data is encrypted, just matters that a signal is detected from a first world target in range of the mine/IED.

It also had me imagine a far future scenario where soldiers get too close to an enemy and accidentally recharge the enemy's depleted railgun.

Amusing scenario however don't expect it to be a significant risk - any wireless system would most probably perform negotiations before beaming out any significant amount of power. You want that to avoid damaging sensitive electronics, overheating a random chunk of metal, or plainly wasting energy.

Even the good old Qi wireless charging standard does negotiations, tho those aren't secured by any means.

It's probably easier to just have some sort of magsafe-like connector for power and data inside the vehicle. Charge the batteries with something like USB-PD to get the most out of the time a soldier might be stationary in the vehicle. Use the data connection to allow everyone's communications to go through the vehicle radio.

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