What will the average battlefield look like to the footsoldier of 2060? What kind of technology will the average grunt have at his disposal and what kind of technology will he be facing? What kind of tactics will he employ? What will be the difference between soldiers from well-funded nation-states or corporate groups and less-well-funded guerilla organizations or smaller nation-states? I’m particularly interested in urban warfare, but more traditional, non-urban open field or wilderness warfare is also open for discussion. Feel free to speculate wildly (even to the point of “gee whiz, wouldn’t it be cool to have that?”), but try to extrapolate from current development trends and tactics.
And yes, this is for a (fiction) story I’m working on. I’ve got some ideas in my head, but I want to see if my ideas hold water when compared with what the august military mind of the Dope can come up with.
The battlefield of the future will be dominated by US Army Kill-Bots that operate autonomously or by remote. They can be controlled remotely by wireless from homes in the United States. The interface will be sold in retail stores and look like the First Person Shooters of today.
People will be able to ‘play’ wargames online, and make a decent living collecting money for every kill. They will login and chose what conflict and what type of mission they want. As their skills increase they will have more mission types available to them. Some ‘rail-gods’ will be hired or recruited by the military.
They will fight actual meat soldiers from countries that cannot afford killbots or cheaper killbots manufactured by the People’s Republic of China.
I don’t necessarily buy the Ender’s Game thing because I don’t think the military types will reliquish that much control over their rampaging kill-bots. But what we’re really talking about is the domination of peoples and countries who can’t afford their own rampaging kill-bots by the people who have control of the rampaging kill-bots, is it not?
The trouble with bots is that they are machines and can thus be captured, reprogrammed, jammed, or just plain outsmarted & outmoded.
The trouble with remote control continues to be jamming or otherwise interfering with the control/feedback signal. Jamming vexes soldiers & equipment even today despite frequency-hopping technology. There is no reason to expect the counter-countermeasures will not remain on the heels of the counter measures. It’s what makes a war fun!
Bots, 'borgs & droneswill be very useful tools, but will not consititute more than an embellishment to the fully organic units who will continue to be in harm’s way. I can see genetically enhanced soldiers taken and trained from prepubescence to maximize their utility as universal soldiers. I see a lot of handy and versatile equipment to augment the fundamentally human beings who could do their job naked if need be, but who are especially powerful when operating at full capability.
A hobby of mine is keeping informed about military technology and research, so I’ll give you my take. Expect combat aviation to be almost completely unmanned and for the most part autonomous. There will be several space based weapon systems operational, likely players include the US, China, Japan, France (EU) and India. Naval assets will revolve around sea basing for those militaries who continue to invest in power projection, mainly the US but also possibly China if the Taiwan issue has not been resolved by then. Directed Energy Weapons will be common on naval vessels, in space, on aircraft and static defense roles on land. Ground troops will become more and more specialized, situational awareness and communications will be more seamless but also prone to attack and subversion. Remotely operated robotic weapons will be common and deployed at squad level, as well as swarms of sensors and spycraft. Tailored combat drugs and life saving medications will be dispensed via “smart” implants or capsules. General advances in medicine will result in a few less combat deaths however the major difference will be in treating and rehabilitating wounded, tissue engineering will be coming fully into it’s own. Advances in materials science means armor will be lighter, more capable for those that can afford it for their troops.
My guess is the future you’re talking about will look a lot like Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie). Individual suits of powered body armor, complete with heavy doses of networked sensors and automated medical equipment (DARPA already has MIT working on this), will make individual soldiers quite dangerous and able to cover distance without transports. This will tend to shift the focus away from armored infantry vehicles, and more into either ultraheavy armored tanks or ultralight/fast/agile cavalry. The tanks will be designed to deal with other tanks and to withstand sustained assault from the armored troops, while the cav will be used to harry and strike at soft targets and flanks.
Ambushes will become very difficult in urban or guerilla warfare, as anything any troop or vehicle sees will be transmitted to every soldier. The rise of unmanned air, ground, and underwater vehicles will also make it very easy for areas to be scouted without endangering soldiers. Generally, the less well-funded will have to rely on tactics based around striking at soft targets or with remote weapons, as any prolonged confrontation will result in their death. Expect to see individual forces focusing on getting ONE THING out of the whole battlespace down to perfection. There won’t be any more Jack-of-all-trade forces, but rather each force will have a specialty and will try to maximize it.
On a general technology level, don’t expect the weapons to change drastically, but rather for everything to get smaller, faster, and more dangerous. Guns will still be used, but the rounds will all be armor piercing and designed to inflict maximum damage after penetration, for example.
I realize that I’ve been speaking mostly in theory (and that’s a little shaky on some issues, I know), but hopefully it will help a little bit.
On preview, lokij and Inigo are very much in the right and on the right track, I should think.
I think it very much depends on whether we have a longish war between now and then and where that war takes place. Or a series of short wars - look at the advances gathered from the Falklands War and Gulf War 1. A large scale non-nuclear war between China and a Russian / American alliance would produce technological marvels.
There will be a genetically engineered mutant who can eliminate entire populations with a single broadcasted thought from his head. “Fry!”, he’ll think, and three billion brains will overload and shut down. Another thought and the Earth itself will bring all the empty, braindead bodies back to his lair to provide him with nutrition. He will also, in a split second, assimilate all the knowledge previously stored in these brains and add it to his ever-expanding collection. A third thought and he’ll have produced another three billion offspring to replenish the supply he consumed. Each member of that population will be of slightly different genetic makeup so that he can test the effects of various mutations. He’ll constantly shape and re-shape the world to facilitate this testing.
The only true “war” left to fight would be him against himself as he attempts to weigh the moralities of his actions. The other “battles” that his creations fight are mere skirmishes, all part of the great experiment. The cycle will repeat itself until the one day he finally has all the answers, and then bang… in another universe somewhere, a strange vibrotronica-lookalike begins to wonder what warfare would be like 55 years from then.
You guys are all on the wrong track. In 2037, tech megapower India’s dominance of south Asia was almost complete. The long nuclear standoff with Pakistan over the Kashmir looked to be winding down with the signing of the SASD Treaty when the unthinkable happened. Before the last strategic nukes could be dismantled, hardliners in Islamabad staged a coup and issues an ultimatum to New Delhi - cede Kashmir immediately, or face the consequences. Three days later they launched, wiping out Jaipur and Mumbai. The response was swift and devastating. Most of Pakistan was glowing in the dark within hours. For two days, it looked like the conflagration might be contained, but then an Indian missile fired on Chengdu in central China. Whether it was a malfunction, human error, or Pakistani infiltrators is still unknown. What is known is that China’s response triggered a cascade of mutual defense treaties in a fashion reminiscent of WWI. China, Russia, France, and Brazil vs. India, US, UK, and Japan, nuclear powers all, and with the genie out of the bottle, missiles flew every which way. 1.5 billion people were dead inside a week, and they were the lucky ones. 2 billion more succumbed to radiation poisoning within months. So much dust was kicked into the atmosphere that crops failed worldwide. Another 4 billion people had died from the famine by 2040, and things didn’t look to be turning around.
In 2060, the only place with anything resembling civilization is sub-Saharan Africa, which had been hit least hard in '37. Infantry there typically carries derivatives of the venerable Kalashnikov. Military technology in the wastelands on other continents varies a great deal. In some locales, horded firearms and ammunition are still available. In others, people are back to bashing each other over the heads with sticks.
Well, okay, probably not. But the point is, 2060 is waaaaaaaaay to far off to make predictions with any sort of accuracy.
On the medical/psychological side, does anyone think we’ll see strategic (as opposed to recreational) battlefield use of drugs become common? Fear suppressors? Aggression enhancers? Hypnosis-like concentration focusers?
Don’t USAF pilots already routinely take uppers for long missions? I seem to recall this coming up during the inquiries falling the friendly fire incident in Afghanistan when that National Guard pilot bombed a Canadian platoon doing a live fire exercise.
As for the contention that we’ll see genetically engineered super-soldiers trained from birth for battle, I highly doubt it unless we repeal the 14th amendment that prohibits involuntary servitude. Just because someone is genetically engineered doesn’t make them a slave.
This might happen occasionally, but I just don’t see it as a common way to do business. You have to be a dictator. You have to keep it secret. You have no way to ensure the loyalty of your super-soldiers. What’s to keep your super-soldiers from killing you and taking your place? How do you keep the super-soldiers from defecting to countries where they won’t be slaves? Life-long indoctrination? Sure, you can try that. But imagine the expense of trying to raise these babies. Your typical dictatorship doesn’t have much spare cash. Are they going to waste money on super-soldiers, or spend that money on hookers and champagne for the oligarchs? Remember that under dictatorships the primary purpose of the military is not to fight wars against neighboring countries but to opress and subjegate your own people. Do you really need super-soldiers to do that? Think about how expensive it is to raise just one kid. If you draft the kid at 18, his parents have already done the hard work, all you have to do is indoctrinate him a bit and hand him a rifle, and you’ve got a political enforcer for dirt cheap.
Liberal democratic countries won’t have super-soldier programs, at least like this. No slavery. Informed consent. Transparency. It isn’t going to be lke the movies, even if we have the technology to create super-soldiers, the social questions will overwhelm the technological ones.
But why would they even have constitutional rights? For that matter, why would they even possess the ability to think for themselves? Any smart dictactor would be make it so that they’re genetically bound to serve one person matching a certain biological signature, i.e. the dictator himself.
As for liberal democratic countries, why do you think you’d have to enslave people to get them to become super soldiers? Wouldn’t some people volunteer for it? As for how you control them, simple… become even more uber yourself. The President will have to be some sort of Super-X-Universal-Hulk.
Another option might simply be Terminators. We’re already headed that way. Then you don’t have to deal with all the pesky human-related issues. And before long, you won’t have to deal with humans at all. Sweet evolution.
They would have constitutional rights because they would be human beings. Sure, we can postulate that the US or Europe or some other country might become a dictatorship and render these constitutional nicities irrelevant, but if we assume that the US remains a democratic government then we will never have genetically engineered super-soldiers raised by the government since birth. It would be slavery.
As for creating super-soldiers that couldn’t think for themselves…exactly how would a person unable to think for themselves function as a soldier, let alone a “super” one? And as for the contention that you would genetically bind these soldiers to serve only the dictator…well, exactly how do you do that? We can easily imagine genitically engineering stronger muscles, faster reflexes, or even exotic things like IR vision, high pain tolerance, fangs, etc. But explain how you genetically bind someone, or even what that means. You can’t just wave a magic wand, it has to be something that is concievable.
If you can volunteer to become a super-soldier when you turn 18, then these super soldiers can’t exactly be genetically engineered and trained since birth, right? They’d just be ordinary people with some sophisticated training and implants. And importantly, they wouldn’t be slaves.