What educated guesses can be made about the development of infantry weapons over the next few decades? What are some of the more interesting experimental infantry weapons/programs today?
I’ll supply my own hypotheses in the next post but please don’t let the discussion be exclusively steered in that direction.
I expect it will be mostly robots, similar to drone warface–with the operator well behind the action.
A century ago, common infantry rifles were about 4 feet long and 12 pounds. Today, a weapon like the M4 weigh half that and are 30 inches long. Personnal defense weapons like the P90 are 20 inches long which is the length of the M16’s barrel. Many assault rifles or machineguns are slight improvements over half-century old designs. For example, the M16 was designed in the 50s and started being used on a wide basis in the 60s. The M240 machinegun was designed in the 50s and is an improved version of the MG34 which was designed in the 30s. The basic functionality, precision, range, practical rate of fire and terminal effects of most infantry weapons are quite similar to what they were in the 60s. It’s reminiscent of the way fighter jets’ top speed, range and service ceiling haven’t changed much since the MiG-21 was introduced in the late 50s.
That isn’t to say that a MiG-21 from 1959 would be anywhere near an equal match to an F-22. Today, most of the cost and added value of fighters and missiles is in the electronics and software, not the airframe or engines. Rifles are starting to follow the same path; A high quality rifle scope can cost up to 4000$ which may be several times more than the rifle itself and people are willing to pay that much because it adds real value over alternatives. Even a basic red dot sight (a modern alternative to iron sights) is a few hundred dollars.
As many of you already know, most infantry to infantry fights occur within 300 meters. A small rifle in intermediate caliber is usually amply sufficient for this. Urban fighting occurs within 50 meters in the vast majority of cases. The performance bottleneck lies not in things made of steel and lead but of glass and silicon; In detecting, tracking (which includes gathering various data about the target) and targeting (including any form of fire control) the enemy. In other words, gathering data, fusing and refining it into useful intelligence and communicating it to the shooter or others quickly and precisely.
At the simpler end, we can have a camera in the scope which display the sight picture on the side or on a helmet-mounted display so that the user can user can peak and shoot around obstacles while minimizing his own exposure.
Then we have things like the Tracking Point scope which enables the user to have most of the aiming done by the scope. The user points the laser rangefinder at a target. The computer updates ballistics data like range, pressure and wind 64 times per second and provides the ballistic solution. The user pulls the trigger and puts the dot of his aiming point unto the dot of his target and the shot goes off automatically much like a figher jet can be programmed to release its bombs only if two conditions are cumulatively fulfilled: the pilot presses the bomb release button and the plane has the right orientation, location and speed for the bombs to hit the target.
The US military is field testing the XM25 grenade launcher. If the enemy is behind cover, the user points the rangefinder at the target then tells the grenade to go off 1-3 meters beyond that point. The user then aims slightly above the enemy’s cover and the grenade explodes a few meters above and beyond the cover. It can also be used to shoot through openings and explode a few meters inside a room in much the same way.
Currently, some ships defensive weapons use the AHEAD system which measures the distance to a target then, as the round is traveling through the barrel, tells the round in how much time (therefor distance) it should explode to spread its shotgun-like payload at the optimal distance to maximize the probability of a hit. This technology could get smaller and and cheaper to be commonly used in small arms like grenades, mortar shells or man portable missiles.
Despite its impressive aerodynamic capabilities, the F-22 isn’t chiefly meant to be duking it out with enemies. Its most common role in a conventional conflict would be to sneak into enemy territory, detect and track targets, relay that information over to other aircraft (especially the E-2). That information would then be relayed to weapons-carrying UAVs, 4th generation fighters, bombers or other munition launchers which would then launch or close within weapon’s range and launch. Mid-course guidance would be provided by GPS, the E-2 or the F-22 with terminal guidance being provided by the F-22 and/or the munition itself. Something like this could also happen with infantry which would be mainly used as spotters and terminal guidance providers for weapons like a ground or air-launched Hellfire, APKWS (a 70mm rocket with a guidance kit) or the Spike missile which weighs 3kg and costs 5000$.
Infantry is usually the stealthiest unit type which makes it a great spotter. Multispectral electro-optics could fuse visible spectrum light, light intensification (possibly in color depending on light avaiability), IR and possibly milimeter wave radar and UV. Currently, machine learning is teaching computers to recognize dogs and birds but it could be used to detect hidden personnel and materiel. An infantryman could sneak in, look through his optics or sensors he’s deployed, have likely enemy entities automatically highlighted and tracked with the range to each target indicated next to it. Where the infantryman’s weapon should point to hit each target could also be indicated. That information could be relayed to other infantrymen so that a grenadier behind a hill 500 meters away could have access to the same information and know precisely where he should point his weapon in the sky to hit each target with time-delayed airbursts.
This would result in expensive, heavy, voluminous munitions. However, it would likely be worthwhile. US military personnel costs about 100 000$ per year and is usually deployed at most 1/3 of the time so that one year in the field costs about 300 000$ in labor-related costs. Counterintuitively, it can be cheaper to go high tech when all costs are taken into account. The higher weight and volume of munitions rears up the prospect of running out of ammo. However, the greater danger is usually to not fire enough rather than too much; Running out of ammo is bad but running out of not being shot is worse. Engagement tends to be short and intense with the first blows having a major effect on the rest of the battle. Going from being undetected by the enemy or responding to an enemy attack to making the enemy reach a tipping point from which it comes apart as a coherent force and no longer benefits from the synergy of being a unit is critical even if it means that your first round costs 5000$ rather than 25 cents.
By “infantry weapons” I assume you mean small arms and man-portable missiles. Given the increasing use of aerial drones and land-based robots (and the inevitable expansion to semi-autonomous active combat roles), I think conventional infantry as it has traditionally been used as a logistically supported mass forward fighting force will essentially disappear. This is not to say that soldiers will not be on the combat field or carry weapons, but the solider of the future is going to look more like special operations or intelligence gathering today, with very focused roles in doing things that drones and robots cannot do well or at all.
Small arms will remain more or less conventional; despite attempts to develop caseless ammunition or advanced combatant seeking projectiles, I suspect we’re going to be using brass-cased smokeless powder propelled rounds. Accuracy and range will incrementally improve, with augmented and networked targeting systems helping soldiers more quickly acquire and precisely aim on targets. Less-than-lethal weapons will be further developed and deployed in humanitarian situations, but for battlefield use copper-jacketed steel core ammunition will remain the primary ammunition used in rifles and carbines. Despite the recent switch from the Beretta M9 to the Sig Sauer P320, I suspect pistols will be further marginalized in favor of compact “personal defense weapon” configurations based upon the same or similar platform as assault rifles. This simplifies logistics and gets rid of a weapon system of marginal lethality and range. Pistols may remain in use for certain special forces applications but as the pressure mounts to equip soldiers with more communication equipment, emergency medical devices, additional body armor, and less-than-lethal weapons, dispensing with the handgun and ammunition just makes sense for most applications.
Soldiers themselves are going to be highly networked, no longer relying on voice-only communications for coordination. In-eyeware and weapon-mounted tactical displays will provide unit and platoon leaders with the ability to coordinate individual movement and track soldiers. All of this comes at the cost of greater workload, which means intelligent systems will have to be used to make recommendations or alert leaders on significant problems or threats. It may also make dependence on such systems a vulnerability as sophisticated adversaries may try to disrupt communication links or even infiltrate the systems. The amount of batteries soldiers will have to carry to power all this gear will continue to increase until they are either provided with load augmentation or you actually have a role (human or more likely robotic) which just carries batteries and other spares.
The acceptance of once nominal combat losses will continue to reduce until the point that the loss of an individual soldier in a high risk operation will be considered completely unacceptable, pushing for more automation and remote operation and less forward action by soldiers. The need for expertise in both tactical operations and human intelligence will still dictate the need for human beings on the front line, but minimizing exposure to direct fire, and advances in body armor and other protective systems will be a large focus for infantry equipment.
Development of indirect fire and latent weapons will continue to be advanced with the requirement that they can be deactivated remotely so as not to pose a residual hazard to non-combatants, and the notion of laying a minefield or dropping clusterbombs that remain in place for years will be considered with the same horror as we think of nerve gas and other chemical warfare now.
Stranger
Who is the USA robot infantry going to invade?
I’m not so sure. At the end of the day, there will always be jobs that require a human being with a weapon to stand guard defending a position.
This article I came across made a number of interesting points:
One of the main ones is that the belief that most infantry combat occurs at ranges under 300 yards is proven to be a fallacy and that our enemies are taking advantage of older 7.62mm weapons to engage US forces at greater ranges.
Advanced optics and target acquisition
Modular systems for reconfiguring weapons for various missions will continue to evolve.
Advanced materials will make weapons and ammo lighter and more reliable.
I would add advanced munitions to that list as well.
Oh, I absolutely agree with that, albeit it is less “stand guard” and more acting in an oversight, technical support, or education role. One of the major roles of the military in both Afghanistan and Iraq was improving and securing logistics, stabilizing the physical infrastructure and political leadership, and training security, support, and medical forces for eventual handover, which are all things that definitely require human effort. And special forces operations and HUMINT will require human expertise (albeit augmented by the use of compact drones, translation devices and sophisticated data analysis, et cetera). But the notion of soldiers marching from place to place on patrol or front line assaults isn’t the reality even now; it’s hugely inefficient and exposes soldiers to unreasonable and unnecessary risk.
Stranger
It’s not so much a “belief” as the result of statistical analysis of wars from WWI forward, most of which were fought with 7.62/.30 cal weapons of some stripe.
Afghanistan is kind of unusual, in that the fighting is apparently done in wide open spaces where you can actually get a 400-500 meter shot. That’s not often the case in other parts of the world, even out in the countryside.
That aside, I suspect that the big developments will be some degree of integration of composite materials in infantry weapons to reduce weight, along with much greater integration with various combat networks and potentially advanced optics and sighting systems.
Could you quote the part of the article which proves that most infantry combat does not occur under 300 yards? It’s most likely my failing but I was unable to find it.
Do you mean they’ll use 5.56mm or 5.45mm as opposed to weapons like the P90 or MP7 which have their own caliber?
Will machineguns be used as much as today? How will they be different?
Do you see suppressors becoming default equipment even on MGs?
Are datalinks, including low probability of intercept ones, particularly vulnerable to noise jamming even if they frequency hop? What other kinds of jamming could interfere with remote operation?
What kind of latent weapons do you envision? How will indirect weapons evolve besides GPS and illumination guidance?
How do you think urban combat will be handled?
In pretty much the same way automobiles will evolve: Driverless.
How soon until all the cutting edge automated, self-aware equipment becomes so cheap every tin horn can have a fleet of Predator-type drones, and have border protection vastly superior to anything the designers of the Maginot Line ever dreamed?
One modern soldier could take out a 500 BCE army.
10 could take out Napoleon
1000 and Robt E. Lee would regret choosing to side with Virginia.
The time from “clearly superior” to “one of the pack” seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
Again, the Web+Cloud problem - the instant communication and accessibility of data will increasingly work against secrecy - the Area 51’s moveable covers to prevent satellite photography of ultra-secret aircraft designs will seem quaint.
A team of world-class hackers (hello, China, CIA, DIA, Vladimir!) will do what satellites never could
Start at the section title “Threat “Overmatch” – the Product of Falling Behind” and read forward. It kind of goes into at length.
There is also a chart that shows the “assumed” engagement distances taking place under 500 meters (90% under 300 meters…not yards…my bad) with actual engagement distances in Afghanistan taking place at up to 900 meters. The image highlights a “capabilities” gap for 5.56mm weapons from 500m to 900m.
bump is correct in that the “belief” was based on historical precedent and actual statistics. Not sure why combat ranges have increased in Afghanistan. Possibly good affordable scopes are more available than they were 60 years ago? Maybe the enemy are more likely to start firefights from further away, even if they can’t hit anything, rather than close and engage with US forces? Maybe it has to do with the hilly desert terrain? Not sure.
I can envision, probably less than a decade, modern combat rifles being essentially a hardened iPod that fires bullets.
From what I’ve seen from Darpa I suspect exoskeletons be the next leap forward.
Look at those precedents. You had Europe and the Pacific as the primary ground combat the US faced in WWII. Korea in some ways is closer to Afghanistan…but without the desertification problem. The decision to make the change was during Vietnam with a lot of jungle fighting. In Afghanistan the insurgency was in rural areas that frequently didn’t have a lot of ground foliage.
The statistics are going to skew towards shorter ranges when you can’t see to shoot further a lot of the time. 
It’s not entirely a last war issue. Adjusting based solely on Afghanistan without considering all the places we might fight and the trade offs would be.
As an article it also ignores some of the efforts to train and equip designated marksmen at squad level for longer range fire. Those aren’t snipers. The wiki leaves off some of the things I’ve personally seen. The mobilization station I worked at leaned towards support units, and didn’t train large maneuver forces headed to Iraq or GoIRA. I still saw a few cases of M14 variants being fielded to designated marksmen in certain deploying Guard/Reserve units that wiki doesn’t mention.
I know its been done and I know it has issues but -------- I still thing caseless ammunition and the reduction in weight/increased ammo load will come along while I’m still alive. Say another 5-10 years.
I have a somewhat humorous (to me) reaction to this. First though, I get what you are saying, and, my thinking is, maybe.
The hardened windows computer that is the M1 Abrams is known to go into safe mode, not frequently, but regularly and refuse to start. Would be a shame to have your rifle suffer hang or completely lock up and then decide your password is no longer valid.
damn cat
What I was trying to say is that there are some issues to be worked out before Apple can start issuing iRifles or Microsoft can start working to have the default infantry stand off weapon be the e-mortar (though it seems this one may be closer to reality now)
heh! battlefield explorer, the vista version, snerk!
I’m not going to hazard a guess on caliber of future weapons other than that it makes sense to move away from traditional pistol caliber rounds that have low sectional density and are not able to pierce all but light body armor to something like the 5.7x28 mm or 4.6x30 mm. It would make sense from a logistics standpoint to move to a highly modular weapon system akin to the Steyr AUG, which uses many common components from its submachinegun and assault rifle through designated rifleman and light machinegun configurations. This means less training, less parts, and the ability to adapt new configurations and accessories like active assistance optics across the system. From that standpoint, it also makes sense to have a base cartridge diameter that is shortened or necked down for lighter use akin to how the .300 Blackout is based on the same 5.56x45mm brass to work in the AR-15 platform. However, the .300 Blackout is something of a design compromise because of this; starting from a fresh slate and using a ~7mm cartridge as the base it should be possible to make purpose designed cartridges that can be used for every purpose from a compact personal defense weapon to a subsonic light sniper tool to a main battle rifle with 500 meter range, all capable of using the same lower receiver (although for compact weapons it might make sense to have a smaller, non-universal lower) and just require a changeout of the upper receiver and adjusting the gas piston. Pistols will still be available for special forces and law enforcement use but for the average soldier they just represent additional weight to carry without much utility.
Machineguns (by this I assume you mean weapons intended for extended fully automatic fire) will definitely have a use, but I find it very likely that they’ll move from being carried by individual soldiers and onto soldier controlled mobile platforms (e.g. non-autonomous robots) and use the kind of automatic targeting system that msmith537 imagines as a “hardened iPod that fires bullets”, capable of handling recoil and carrying more ammunition than a human rifleman can. Their use in suppressing fire or firing on attackers en masse are still unsurpassed.
Suppressors definitely have their uses, especially in confined spaces where the report of an unshrouded weapon can be literally deafening, but their utility is limited when using supersonic cartridges. I don’t expect universal application of suppressors but their installation on lower power weapons will probably increase.
Caseless ammunition is one of those things that seems like a good idea on the outset, and yet no one has been able to get working reliably and inexpensively enough to make it practical. One of the issues has been the ignition source; all workable systems have gone to electrical ignition, which means having some kind of portable power source and power management circuitry. With recent improvements in high energy density and high performance lithium cells this is realizable, but other issues with ammunition durability and reliability still remain. I won’t hazard a guess as to when someone will try to push for caseless ammo again, but for the time being fully integrated brass (or occasionally steel) cased cartridges are the standard cartridge case technology despite being almost a century and a half in practical use.
Data links are likely to be either line of sight to an overhead asset (drone or fire control aircraft) or to satellite communications, using asynchronous CDMA or some other multiple access division scheme to prevent interference. A larger issue is if an opponent figures out a way to spoof the system and upload false or conflicting data, or even upload firmware attacks to disable the system, so a very robust encryption and user verification scheme is necessary.
Latent weapons such as cluster bombs, mines, and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) has become a problem that the public is becoming more aware of, and there is less tolerance for leaving UXO on the battlefield for unsuspecting non-combatants to uncover to their peril. It is my hope that the United States and all allies will adopt more stringent UXO design requirements and treaties to assure that latent devices and unexpended shells will have features which deactivate them after a certain period, or else activate visual or chemical markers which alert people to their presence.
Indirect fire systems such as mortors and howitzers will continue to be used because of their low cost and effectiveness but with active guidance to allow them to follow trajectories impossible for purely ballistic objects and be fired with much greater precision. It should be feasible to design an inertially-guided projectile capable of considerable maneuverability using aerosurfaces or small solid propellant jets for a production cost of a few thousand dollars each or even cheaper, compared to man-portable missiles costing tens of thousands of dollars.
Essentially the same way it is now; poorly. Urban combat is a nightmare because you have visual obstructions, difficulty maintaining communications links, confined spaces, non-combatants who are just trying to live while a battle is fighting around them, and often rapidly changing intelligence about the battlefield conditions, not to mention personnel hazards like gas and electrical lines. This is certainly one area that begs for the use of drones for intelligence and precision striking versus sending in squads of infantry into a risky and highly volatile environment a la the Battle of Mogadishu portrayed in Black Hawk Down.
Stranger
Which, as I understand it, is actually not that different from the performance of the M16 / M4 rifles the military currently uses!
I think what you described is more akin to a weapons system or vehicle than the actual weapons itself. i.e. like saying the state of the art for the .50 caliber machinegun is a thermal imaging camera operated remote mount, placed on 70 tons of all terrain armored vehicle and augmented by a 120mm cannon and all sorts of electronics. It’s still more or less the same Browning M2 “Ma Deuce” .50 from World War II, only mounted on an Abrams battle tank.
While I can certainly envision autonomous or semi-autonomous drones armed with what were traditionally “crew served support weapons” like the M2 augmenting the light infantry platoon or company, I think the question is still what the standard personal weapon of those light infantrypeople will look like.
Also:
Tank Commander: Gunner! Target BTR-90 bearing one-three-zero at two thousand yards, HEAT round!
Gunner: HEAT UP!!..Hold on…it’s installing updates… 10%…50%…75%…100%!
TC: Well?!
Gunner: Rebooting…
TC: Now?
Gunner: One sec…logging in…wait…crap…no networks…restarting wifi router…and…ON THE WAY!!