http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?click_i...36F362&set_id=1

So I wonder to myself, is this a good or bad thing? Sure, it will protect soldiers, and it can be used for fire fighters, but making more powerful armor makes everyone else develope more powerful weaponry. And im sure that there are better places the money could be going. What is your opinion?

I can't see this stuff ever becoming a wide-scale feature of any army, America or otherwise. I didn't read the whole article so didn't catch anything about the price of these battle suits, but I'd guess it'd be around $100,000 - $500,000 per suit. If we look at the amount of soldiers in Iraq at the moment, roughly 100,000...

$250,000 x 100,000 = $25,000,000,000 to suit up the US army in Iraq.

I think they'd be better off putting the money into cybernetics than battle suits that humans have to operate.

Haha sounds kind of like a good idea to me, but like Dark0ne says, it's really not practical. They'd never be able to suit up all their forces in that stuff anyway, it'd be too damn expensive. Unless they manage to find an extremely cheap way to manufacture all that advanced technology it wouldn't work.

As for more powerful weapons... maybe. But remember nowadays we're usually fighting against terrorists who wouldn't have the resources to build anything that advanced. However if someone else did as a precaution and terrorists got hold of it, that wouldn't be good.

Not to mention the uproar it would cause if the American army suddenly got this new soldier super armour, it might force more nervous nations to act (war), thinking that America had too much of an unfair advantage.

I guess none of you really read the article... it's full of idealistic dreaming, no more realistic than the articles from 50 years ago that said we'd all have flying cars and be living on the moon. Their "demonstration" was an idea of what the system might look like, assuming they can solve that minor problem of not having any of the technology it requires...



That's assuming they used it for everyone. Not everyone would need it... a tank driver or pilot, for example, wouldn't be able to use it effectively. So that's a lot of those 100,000 soldiers taken off the list... and that's not even counting the reduction in numbers something that powerful would allow (assuming it is possible to be made as-described).

Oh, and just for comparison... one carrier costs about 6 billion, so the price is high, but within reach if the US military really wanted them.



Not likely. Simple physics puts a limit on how powerful a weapon a human can use. There isn't going to be anything for terrorists to get.



Your point? You seem to forget the minor problem that in a defensive war (as opposed to invading China, for example) the US could probably defeat the entire rest of the world. The balance of power is just that one-sided... and that's not even counting the fact that you couldn't unite the rest of the world against us, or that our allies would rather have a chance at the armor than fight us in a suicidal war.

Can you say:


Power armor is always cool.

Neat, but I doubt it will affordable.

Then Windows crashes and he dies a terrible Blue Screen of Death

Snigger. This is true, the technology is still years and years away, but I don't see why its such a bad vision for the future. As Dark0ne said, the costs will be astronomical, but would all the suits have to have all the features; for example, the remote control unit on the soldiers arm for controlling UAVs and whatnot wouldn't be needed by the regular soldier, or even most officers. I don't doubt that the US would have several different types for different applications in combat; they have them in everything else they use. I think that, yes, the money could probably be useful on something else, but this is still an interesting if hypothetical look at the future of (American) wars.

Oh, ultra-tech nano-armor. I'd bet that even the most supercharged of microbullets won't be able to fracture it!

Besides being the best candidate for Bullshit Bingo I've seen all my life, this article describes something that only an ignorant, cowardly, and immature military would use -- at the very least, a military that can't get its objectives in order. If this is actually deployed in combat that is expected to last more than a matter of days, then the enemy gets desperate. If they can't fight our military on equal grounds, then I'll give you one guess as to what their next target would be.

...And then think about what sort of recruits we'd be getting with this army of invincible soldiers -- a bunch of cavalier high-school football heroes that enlist so that then can get their own page in the yearbook. We end up with a bunch of careless killing machines on the ground, and friendly fire, broken treaties, and complete lack of proper command follows. As bad as that may be when they're active abroad, I'd shudder to think what would happen once the war is over, and we release a bunch of ravenous thugs with absolutely no concept of death into the general population.



What theorem of simple physics creates this limit?

You make a good point Marxist; I didn't consider the psychology of making a group of soldiers, not the most modest of people anyway, invincible. Of course, if such technology was available the number of soldiers would be reduced so stricter recruiting could be conducted to filter out the ignorant fools. Ah well, it's not like this will ever happen, at least not in the next 30-odd years. Maybe by then we'll have world peace

We're talking about the US here. The primary question to consider when making any decision is "would this increase our economic well-being?"

It is an exercise left up to you to determine if it would be profitable for the government to spend money on raising recruiting standards so that we are left with a kinder, gentler military that does less damage to the target, the end result being less work for contractors.

Ah. Again you make a good point. I guess I was being niave to thik that the US might actually think about the well-being of anyone other than their shareholders; since what is the US now, if not a huge commercialised business?

The question you refer to in the US is surely "would this increase the economic well-being of the ruling oligarchic plutocracy?" 'Our' is a bit too idealistic there unless you are a member of that group and your forum name would suggest otherwise.

I am not sure however that that question applies all the time. Periodically I think it changes to 'what will give us the best results in the next election?'. These are sometimes contradictory. This is why election promises have to be broken.

So, since the US has a morally bankrupt government it seems apparent that this system won't benefit the world come its unveiling (if ever). But what if another country were to come up with somethig like this for use among its troops? The applications among UN peace-keeping forces, where they are almost always out-numbered and in hostile country, should be beneficial shoudn't they?

What the candidate lacks in morality, he makes up for in advertising budget. These words have been spoken every four years since the inception of radio broadcasting, and have always held true.

That minor one about equal and opposite reaction that says a human can't use a tank cannon as a rifle. You know, where the recoil force breaks the arm of the idiot who tries anyway.

And besides that, there's the issue of weight... carrying around a 500lb weapon isn't practical, so individual soldiers will have a limit on their firepower.

I don't think that the concerns here are the little pop-guns that infantry are going to be equipped with. The concern is that if said pop-guns stop working, more drastic measures would be called for that can have some long-lasting effects even after the war is over.

Chemical and biological weapon research, the use of land mines, the general destruction of anything that could serve as cover so that snipers can get a clean shot, &c. -- things that could cause some very ill effects for the civilian population -- will likely start to proliferate at the same time that sophisticated body armor does.

That post you quoted was in reply to the idea of terrorists getting some miracle weapon to defeat this armor. Obviously heavy weapons could do the job (even if the armor doesn't break, hitting it with a tank shell will squish the person inside), but how many terrorists do you see driving around in tanks?

These drastic measures you're talking about are only available to formal armies with huge research budgets, not some terrorist group. And when you're talking about war on that scale, we're already way beyond the damage those things can cause. A minefield looks pretty minor in comparison to flattening half a city with a B-52 strike.

And anyway, these measures won't be needed. At most, you make pure infantry combat rarer, and most militaries upgrade to light vehicles that can carry heavier weapons. It just means instead of one guy and a rifle to kill someone, you use the 30mm cannon mounted on your light tank.

The idea that any advances in body armor technology could require some absurd increase in overall firepower is just showing ignorance of the physics involved. Anything that can be worn by a single human as armor is going to be limited in its protection. A missile small enough for a single person to carry and use can already kill a tank... there's no way body armor is going to match that firepower. Even if it stopped it from penetrating, the shock of the impact would kill the person inside.

A claymore mine doesn't take trilions of dollars to build and deploy. Additionally, it isn't just some nutjob poorly-organized terrorist group that will face just the least bit of desperation against an army of invincible men.



Even sites that suffered a nuclear blast are relatively safe now. Minefields that predate nuclear weaponry are still yet to be cleared.



Rarely does a desperate foe do exactly that which you would deem as "needed."



I don't care about the firepower that the average man on the ground is going to be packing. A Kar 98K will rarely destroy villages, poison water supplies, and make areas uninhabitable for decades -- I have no reason to assume that will change with advances in rifle manufacturing.

However, once conventional methods prove largely futile, other strategies need to be taken into consideration. Those methods are what have me concerned.

Yes that is the price now but as an example prices of things that seem so advanced eventually drop down as they become more common. Such as a VCR they used to cost around $500 now you can get them for $50 or even $20.

Claymore mines are already being used in large numbers. Improving body armor won't change this fact. Even the terrorists use the much larger and nastier version already.


And who said anything about invincible? Well-protected against rifle bullets maybe, but far from invincible.



Your point? How long the damage lasts is irrelevant, how many people it kills is what's important. Nuking a city off the map causes a lot more harm than the occaisional death to a minefield.



Yes, because desperation is going to make them use devastating biological warfare against the invading US army, destroying themselves in the process, when a simple anti-tank missle would do the job just as well. Or even a 30mm cannon in the back of a truck.


Then I don't see your point. If we're not talking about the man on the ground, we're already way past the point where we can do all that damage. Improving armor isn't going to change anything. The weapons that will kill it are still going to be much less damaging than the 500lb bombs we're dropping everywhere.



Conventional methods aren't going to prove futile, that's my whole point. The weapons you'd use to defeat this improved armor are already being used in large numbers.

So are you saying that it would be better to have the "Communist/Arab/whoever has what the Us want/ peoples use nice normal weapons to kill soldiers rather than have them protected by armour which is by design resistant to biological weapons? The way I see it having these would maake the jobs of, for example, the UN Rapid-Response unit (I forget the full name or size, I just know that some multi-nation task-forcey thing is being set up to act like the US MEC only in the name of something other than US greed) a whole lot easier - in an hostile environment where you are guaranteed to be outnumbered by the enemy having your troops in these would give a serious tactical advantage, which may well effect things on a deterent level; if you know that a battalion of "unkillable" soldiers (save by, as you have put, an anti-tank rocket to the chest of each of them) would you really invade that neighbouring country and kill those women and children?

I know I'm being ridiculously over-generalising here but I think the applications of this project out-weigh any potential problems if they were well-managed (ie, not managed by the US).

Err, what? I think you misread my reply. That was to Marxist ßastard's suggestion that having armor that can stop rifle bullets means you have to jump straight to biological warfare that leaves your country uninhabitable for years. Which is completely stupid, as there are plenty of weapons that can kill this super-armor without doing that kind of collateral damage.



Well, the last part you can just keep dreaming about. If anyone's going to develop it, it's going to be the US.