High Cost of Force Protection Wednesday, Mar 5 2008
images 11:29 am
From My Confined Space. This post was just supposed to be for fun, but it inspired Brian Wang, and now me, to think about futuristic warfare a little more seriously.
I don’t think the future of warfare (if there is one — world peace is possible) lies in mechs either, unless they are extremely fast (supersonic). I would favor a mix of 1) distributed fairyfly bots and 2) massive force projection, 3) the ability for the entire army to run away very quickly when threatened.
Flying machines inspired by insect biomechanics could be very small — fairyflies are 140 microns across. A microgram of botulinum is enough to kill ten people. If you could manufacture trillions of these, your army would be extremely hard to stop. You can’t seal every soldier in a completely airtight container. Advanced (5-10+ years after MNT, if MNT is possible) bloodborne nanomachines could theoretically combat this, but they’d have to respond very quickly. A fairyfly bot could merely fire a flechette deep into the skin, and would be very difficult to locate the toxin quickly.
For massive force projection, we have nuclear weapons. The future of warfare will mainly be about be finding cleverer ways quickly manufacture and deploy them successfully (like being the Terrans in Starcraft.) Given enough dummy missiles and warhead speed, it’s impossible to mount defenses. Currently, we can launch a nuclear missile to anywhere on the globe in less than an hour or so, and a bomber in several hours. This is too slow. The US is building a hypersonic bomber with a two hour response time to anywhere on the globe. Our current ballistic missiles will eventually need to be replaced by scramjet versions. Currently, scramjet technology eludes us, as big projects have pumped tons of money into the field and still failed. What is needed are completely new materials, like a diamondoid chassis.
I can imagine a dense cloud of utility fog being used as a temporary shield for nuclear missiles, throwing chunks of metal in the way of an incoming missile, but this would only work so well. A high-powered laser on the missile tip would let it plow through most obstacles on the way to the target. For this reason, I believe offense will be fundamentally more powerful than defense, to answer a question CRN sometimes brings up.
As for running away very quickly, it would help to have your entire force consist of primarily the fastest unit — this will be different depending on whether it’s the atmosphere, underwater, subterranean, or outer space you’re moving through. Scramjets for air, supercavitating subs for underwater. I don’t know what can move fast underground. Underground is probably safest, as nukes have the smallest blast radius there. Then again, you can move really fast in space. Water also has wonderful thermal absorption properties. I doubt many military strategists have thought much about wide-scale underwater and underground nuclear warfare, because submarines are extremely expensive and slow, and there is no vehicle that can move quickly underground (so far as I know anyway).
Ratio’s of wounded to killed and figures for how many killed per division based on time in combat show big statistical improvement. However, a significant amount needs to be factored out as not fighting opponents that are anywhere close to being at an equal level as Germany and Japan were to the Allied forces.
Costs should also look beyond personnel gear to supporting systems. The cost and quality of the air and fire support that can be called in is a bigger difference than whether a gun is slightly better than an opponents kaleshnikov in terms of varying levels of casualties between the US and opposing side.
The 5th gen system still looks like it could be taken out with an IED, rocket propelled grenades or the systems on a fully stocked current humvee or MRAP.
Did you do the Photoshopping?
“The 5th gen system still looks like it could be taken out with an IED, rocket propelled grenades or the systems on a fully stocked current humvee or MRAP.”
Yes, but such weapons are currently designed to take out vehicles, which are much less numerous that mechs will be.
“The cost and quality of the air and fire support that can be called in is a bigger difference than whether a gun is slightly better than an opponents kaleshnikov in terms of varying levels of casualties between the US and opposing side.”
Guns don’t enter into it; the diagram shows armor (which does make a big difference in wounded/dead numbers). Vastly improved medical care for US forces also helps.
I loves me some battlemechs.
I do, however, feel a little uneasy about fully autonomous battlemech weapons systems, however. As much as I would like to witness a good old-fashioned Robotic Apocalypse, in reality, the concept of autonomous weaponry is just scary–especially in light of the absolutely pathetic nature of most operating systems’ native security. Regardless of soft- or hardware security measures, any computer system can potentially be hacked…and then what?
The last thing I’d want to see is the US deploying a regiment of Terminators to the Middle East only to discover, to their commanders’ horror, that some clever Iranian boy with a hopped-up OLPC has hacked into their control systems as has rewritten their task list to DESTROY ALL US/UN TROOPS.
Weaponry can compute energy usage, ballistics data, and other forms of logistical processing to make it more effective in combat–but weaponry should never, ever think for itself in any extensive fashion. Telepresence is a much better means of controlling 5th Generation battlemechs: that way, if the telepresence connection is severed, the machine could either shut down or, even better, detonate its fusion engines.
Derek — you think too much like a computer geek.
If you don’t want something hacked, disconnect it from the web. Fully autonomous war robot = no internet connection.
Fully autonomous war robot = no internet connection.
And useless. Orders have to be given.
Tom – no, that’s why I say it’s from another site.
“Tom – no, that’s why I say it’s from another site.”
You didn’t link directly to the picture, so I thought you might have downloaded the original from that site and photoshopped it yourself.
I took inspiration from this article to speculate on robotically driven hummers as being a more economical version of the hypothetical armored mech ($500k-700K hypothetical)
Armored or unarmored humvees could come in cheaper than the mech and I think could be just as effective (Other than in building urban fighting)
UAVs and other unmanned vehicles/robots are the future of warfare. Some say the F-35 JSF will be the last manned fighter jet produced.
Unmanned aerial reconnaissance and fighter vehicles could blanket the planet and be available within minutes, if not seconds and could accelerate and maneuver in ways that no human body could withstand. With state of the art sensors, precision guided munitions and directed energy weapons, inclusively providing strategic, fast-attack, ground support, search and rescue and recon capabilities these vehicles would be versatile and formidable.
Smaller probes could provide ubiquitous surveillance and trouble spots could be layered with ‘smart dust’, each mote a digital camera, collectively providing a 3-D image of the area.
(btw, arming probes with toxins or other agents would be a direct violation of the rules of war.)
Advances in ABM technology could one day make nuclear missiles obsolete. Directed energy weapons will change the way we fight. Information and electronic warfare capabilities and counter-measures will become more potent and significant over time.
Ultimately, you’ll still need human eyeballs and brains, boots on the ground and human strategic and tactical analysis and decision making, but it’s quite possible that we’ll be fielding a ‘joystick army’ someday.
Ubiquitous killingry might prove to be the next and perhaps final MAD scenario. Ironically, it may also help lead the way to world peace.
I have to disagree with you on several points.
1) Peace is possible. Theoretically peace is possible. Is it realistic to expect civilisation to becomes peaceful anytime in the next 100 years? Not likely. You would have to reengineer humanity in order to remove the possibility of war. We don’t know what would happen socially if we started to manipulate or natural behaviour. We could easily end up destroying the human race by making us too passive, or too agressive (some would argue we are already too agressive). The point is, it isn’t realistic to say that peace is possible with our current understanding of human nature.
You would need to remove the possibility of dictators rising up, you would need to remove the tribalism that is instinctual in human beings. I would argue that tribalism is the major cause of conflict in the world, and it would be extremely difficult to socialize all of humanity, or even a majority, to view everyone as their “tribe.”
2) That mechanistic robots will not be the future of war. They will most definitely be the future of war. I don’t think that large scale mechs are realistic, they are too easy to take out compared to tanks, but human sized or a bit larger in an urban environment is a very realistic scenario.
They would be good for being the first into the urban environment, entering buildings as well as patroling streets to remove the threat from snipers and searching for ide’s.
I don’t see toxins as a threat either. If MNT is possible then you could have suits that have active defenses to prevent microscopic entry into airtight suits. Not to mention medical nanobots designed to fight off toxins, bacteria, and viruses.
I would also argue that a cloud of nanobots in the air would be an excellent defense against any airborn missile attack. They wouldn’t even need to put up a solid shield, only manipulate the missile as it moves through them, enough to direct it away from people.
I really hope that we develop energy sources capable of allowing cheap space flight and colonization before we begin fully weaponizing nanotechnology. At least by then, those of us with some common sense, can form colonies in space, away from all the war on earth. You still have to deal with human nature. But that’s nothing a super computer won’t solve. If you have a powerful enough computer you could theoretically simulate human interaction with various tweaks to our genetic code and how we behave. Find the optimal tweak that means peace as well as defense when needed and you have the beginnings of a better society. I think it’s a must for the future of all sentient beings.
As an addendum to my previous comment, I would suggest that the implications of living in a world where every square inch is mapped and targeted so that precise and lethal force could be applied at any time, almost instantaneously, deserves careful consideration.
Many minds spent many years studying and observing the world-changing effects of nuclear warfare and MAD. Next-generation warfare will probably be just as world-changing, if not more. Students of the future would be well served by plugging these factors into their ruminations and projections, regardless of their stance on world peace and human aggression.
Folks, for military applications of bleeding-edge tech, you really need to keep up with what’s coming out of DARPA. Some of the stuff they have in development is astonishing. The stuff they’re only researching is mind-boggling.
Chances are, DARPA is also heavily funding and collaborating on weapons and manned and unmanned combat-related research in a university near you. (The Urban Grand Challenge isn’t even the tip of that ol’ iceberg.) DARP is heavily invested in every bit of technology that
Transhumanists go on about…all of it..and much, much more.
Oh, yeah…4th and 5th Gen Warfare may not mean quite what you think it means…
“You can’t seal every soldier in a completely airtight container.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_suit
“Our current ballistic missiles will eventually need to be replaced by scramjet versions.”
Current ICBMs are pretty much the fastest possible nuke-launching devices, even in theory. Speed in LEO is determined by orbital mechanics, not engine power; too much speed and you’ll simply fly off into space.
“For this reason, I believe offense will be fundamentally more powerful than defense,”
There are ten bazillion possible future weapons technologies and you’re only looking at a few. What about the other possibilities?
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