Urgh, they’re threatening to deploy the Land Warrior System in spite of the reservations of the men in the firing line.
The problems with Land Warrior are seemingly obvious:
- Having every soldier trackable individually is simply going to overload the command and control system. We have our armies broken down into units under a hierarchical structure for a reason which is to strike a balance between overload and oversight.
- Being able to peer around a corner without exposing oneself (because of the “clever” camera on your gun) is all very fine but consider this: your enemy is smart enough to hide until you and your buddies do expose yourselves allowing for a more effective ambush.
- Advanced signalling breaks - hand signals are by far the best way of directing people under these extreme conditions.
- Soldiers won’t have time to gaze at their heads up display to check on where everyone in their unit is positioned before taking action. Put simply, the enemy is not going to sit still whilst you plan out the perfect attack [”No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” - Moltke]
Perhaps more worrying is that the US military has had warnings about their excessive focus on technology previously.
This whole debacle is a classic example of what happens when those not at the sharp end invent things they think are a good idea and foist them on the hapless individuals they intend to “help”. It is a mistake repeated daily in IT projects around the world. For the enterprise this is merely serious, on the battlefield it’s quite possibly lethal.
Technorati Tags: military, technology
Entries (RSS)
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Looks like the debate “new features in the Java language vs architecture and process management”. OTOH they have the technology, it must be deployed on the field for testing sooner or later. At this stage it’s the only definite way to learn whether things are wrong or must be improved.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Deployment into the field is acceptable if up until now you’ve been successful which is not the case for the military tech above. Certainly in terms of close quarter battle tactics, trusting your team to be in the right place at the right time appears absolutely necessary as you need all your senses deployed searching for the enemy and responding to their actions as quickly as possible.
In the case of Java one can argue that deployment is the only way to test effectiveness but:
(1) There should be some plan for removing features that fail in such a deployment - deprecation doesn’t count as it takes too long. I’m talking rollback for want of a better term.
(2) There should be some appropriate datapoints to justify the deployment - too many times we accept subjective arguments backed by zero critical thinking which for our profession is surely unacceptable.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Consider the case where a helicopter pilot needs to evacuate a unit. Knowing where the unit is, without needing to communicate with them - which itself might lead to their exposure, is extremely valuable.
Although I agree that within the unit itself the relevance of the technology is more limited.
April 30th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Udi,
Yep although making the helicopter aware of position will require comms from the unit albeit perhaps a single burst though in at least some combat situations the pick-up point is fluid due to pursuit by enemy forces which thus requires repeated bursts.
And in fact at least special forces already carry such equipment which they can enable at the point of distress giving a good balance between risk of exposure and recoverability.