What will be the next big step forward in military technology?

[ftg]

@Inigo Montoya

It occurs to me that a lot of bloodshed can be avoided by effective leadership decapitation–like what we did, eventually, with Iraq. Had we put an end to Hitler when it became aparent that doing so was a good idea I imagine WWII would have been a bit different. While it’s neat that we can drop a bunker buster down someone’s chimney, we have seen that accuracy is not nearly as important as aiming at the correct target.

During the “official” phase of Bush War II, the US made 50 strikes at high level leadership targets. The result: 0 for 50. Hundreds of Iraqi civilian “non-targets” did die though from those. (Cite: recent PBS “Frontline”.)

Yeah, you can take out a bunker. But there’s a lot of bunkers. There’s also far, far more non-bunkers. You going to take out everything in a country? That leads to Bad Things during the occupation phase.

While people talk about mobile and remote sensing here, smaller, cheaper devices are going to be big. Scatter a bunch of 2" square sensors over an area of interest. Once in while send a “talk to me in 5 microseconds” command to each. Learn what’s going on.

Note that defeating hi-tech weapons can be amazingly easy. In Yugoslovia, the Serbs made hundreds of fake tanks and scattered them around. The US claimed an immense number of hits on them. Big news in the media. Years later, they find out they hardly hit a single real tank. Little news in the media.

Even if they had today’s tech in Vietnam, it wouldn’t have made much difference. (Except for the airwar in the North.) Hi-tech doesn’t work against non-tech enemies who dig holes in jungles.

There’s been too much overconfidence lately based on success against low-morale troops in open desert country. Most wars aren’t fought in such an idealized situation.

[Starguard]

I would imagine it being definitely space oriented. Somewhere along THESE LINES

[Kalhoun]

@Paul in Saudi

A couple of things.

First off we are on the edge of a technological breakthrough in armor. Spider silk will be coming online in industrial quantities in the next few years. This will allow everybody to have a (mostly) bulletproof uniform.
Or not.

Evidently we saw the same program, Paul in Saudi. I think lessening the number of casualties is in the forefront because our weapons technology is already far superior to anything anyone else has out there. We already out-fly, out-shoot, out-bomb, and out-logistics anyone in the world. We just need to make the human factor safer at the moment.

(This prediction is subject to change at any moment, without notice.)