Home » Archives » "Soldier of the Future Goes to War"

Soldier of the Future Goes to War

Sep-26-2007 » Filed Under: 4/2 SBCT

Noah Schactman of Wired magazine files another embedded dispatch with the 4-9 INF, 4/2 SBCT that focuses on the Land Warrior concept. Excert:

I've just spent a week with Prior and the 4/9 (known as the "Manchus" since their assaults on China in 1901). And much to my surprise, a bunch of the soldiers in the unit are warming up to Land Warrior, especially now that the gizmo ensemble has been pared down and made more tactically relevant. So now the question is: can this once-doomed soldier-of-the-future ensemble spring back to life?

Over the last decade, the military has connected nearly all its command posts and all its vehicles into a kind of internet for battle. That allowed them to, at the very least, see each other's locations and better coordinate attacks.

Individual soldiers, however, still remain largely off the grid -- only now, more than four years into the Iraq war, are many troop teams getting radios of their own. That's a problem because counterinsurgency fights, like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, are almost wholly dependent on small groups of soldiers like these. Land Warrior was supposed to be the way to plug them in.


Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by a site administrator before your comment will appear. We appreciate your patience.)

Advertisements