(I have too many blog post drafts ready to go, well into December. I'll thus publish this and maybe another in addition to the regular Saturday rhythm.)
Years ago - in ancient times before the Great Pandemic - I visited a small exhibition of old firefighting vehicles. Beautiful red & chrome trucks with special firefighting payloads. They were oldtimers, but in fantastic condition because they stood in firefighters' garages for decades.
I mean this literally. Most firefighting vehicles are hardly moving, like ever. There was a 1950's firefighting truck which had run only about 15,000 km until it was retired.
currently on offer: 42,656 km at 35 years age
For comparison; a logistics company can easily get 400,000 km out of a comparable vehicle in eight years.
The demands are thus very different. Firefighters don't need to care about fuel efficiency or durability in terms of kilometres driven. They need to care about longevity; seals and rubber components need to be either fine for decades of service or easily replaceable. Corrosion is not really a concern because they park their vehicles indoors.
Armies are similar to firefighters, save for the indoor parking. Some truck types remained in service for four decades, and not just the model; the individual trucks lasted that long.
A look at a platform for used military vehicles provides some anecdotal confirmation:
At the time of writing I see examples ranging from a 1988 4x4 truck with 2,014 km to a heavier 1993 4x4 truck with 130,198 km. A 1996 IVECO EuroTrakker is one of the heavier and more-used vehicles, 1996 and 85,910 km.
So basically the civilian businesses drive trucks much and wear them out in a few years, while the government rather has trucks in the inventory for training and 'just in case we need them when shit happens'.
This parallel existence of both philosophies is extremely wasteful. Here's an alternative truck strategy:
Talk to manufacturers of civilian trucks and tell them to keep longevity in mind.
Buy civilian vehicles after they've run about 200,000 km in less than 10 years.
Repaint them, modify the cab, install what payload the military needs.
Keep using them for another 30 years, adding only up to 150,000 km.*
Repair them when possible with spare parts recycled from spent civilian vehicles. Using a COTS** design has the benefit that you have an easy spare parts supply.
It should be mentioned that the construction site vehicles that would be most suitable for military use (due to 6x6 or 8x8 formulas) do not drive quite as much as logistics vehicles, but the concept still works with them.
The IVECO Trakker range has plenty 4x4, 6x6 and 8x8 models for civilian uses that are also reasonable choices for military uses, for example. Up to 200,000 km Trakkers can be had for much less than 100,000 € despite the current price peak for used motor vehicles.
The standard cab types are VERY similar to civilian Trakkers. Low budget armies might not be able to afford "tactical" trucks and instead make do with 6x6 and 8x8 "logistical" trucks, which have a little less off-road ability. Most army wheeled vehicles only need as off-road ability for hiding inside woodland or bypassing craters/wrecks on a road anyway. They don't need super gymnast suspensions.
I strongly suppose that the army bureaucracies with tight budgets and
no national truck manufacturers to subsidise by government contracts
could benefit greatly from such a strategy.
I wrote in the skirmishing blog post that pre-absolutism skirmishers seemed to have been skirmishers because they were low budget (and if self-equipped: poor) troops. At some times you didn't need more than a primitive sling and picked-up stones to be an effective skirmisher (albeit the mercenary skirmishers often used more effective lead projectiles and small cheap shields).
Heavily armoured troops tended to be expensive professionals of nobles whose life, horses and equipment were supported by multiple farming households.
- - - - -
The often-reported problems and ineffectiveness* of present-time armoured infantry (armoured as wearing bulletproofing body armour, even including shoulder guards and somewhat bulletproofed helmets) made me think.
What if this is not something new, what if this is how it always was? Were more heavily armoured infantrymen of the classical and medieval period really of superior military value?
I suppose the easiest example to look at are late republican / early imperial Roman legionaries, for we know that they had very few servants and pack animals compared to heavily armoured infantry of other periods.
The reputation of these legionaries is still extremely high about two millennia later, but there's something odd:
The biggest and most important expansion of Rome's power happened from the last years of the First Punic War (about 240 BC) to the end of Augustus' reign (until 14 AD). The reforms of Marius that created the all-heavy infantrymen (which always needed reinforcement by dissimilar mercenaries) army of late Republican and early imperial Rome happened only in 107 BC.
The defeat of Carthage, conquest of Greece and conquest of half of Iberia fell into a period during which the Roman army had severe quality issues and was far from the now-common idea of Roman legionaries. The decades of warfare and neglect of family farms since around 260 BC had ruined the base of Roman power; the citizenry (and socii citizenry). Their army was divided into three classes of middle and upper class men, separated by wealth. By about 215 BC there was little left of what we would call middle class now.
The army was at the time about 30% lightly armed velites, skirmisher infantry no better equipped than most enemies (previously about 15%). Velites used for all we know no body armour. It's even questionable whether many of them used helmets. The role of velites and later particularly lightly protected hastati apparently kept growing until the Marian reforms, as Roman society became increasingly economically unequal and the middle class kept eroding through warfare and exploitation of the upper classes. The sum of light troops (including mercenaries) may have exceeded 50% rather often on Roman campaigns.
The classical trio of triarii (few rich men, mostly held in reserve),
hastati (main infantry and velites (skirmishers, poorest men able
to afford any regulation infantry armament at all)**
So Rome's empire was in large part built not by the famed heavy infantry legionaries stomping their opposition by their own, but by armies which were in large part light infantry without body armour. The Roman demographic, economic, organisational strengths and certain details*** were almost certainly much more important factors in Roman military success than heaviness of arms and armour.
- - - - -
I understand that heavy body amour was and is often preferable in pitched battle from the point of view of the user. Or at least it seemed so to those who had no heavy body armour, a phenomenon that we were able to observe during the early years of the Iraq occupation.
You could hardly motivate men to sign up for decades of legionary service without protecting them well. They had neither tetanus vaccine nor penicillin. There was no proper military pensions or disability benefits system for crippled discharged soldiers until the 20th century. They would turn beggars and probably starve real quick. There were historical mercenaries with little or no armour, but those were short-time mercenaries, hired only for a specific campaign.
The question remains whether heavily armoured troops were really more effective. I picked an example in which they could be compared almost 1:1 to light troops. Heavily armoured infantry of other eras had such a train of servants, pack animals, carts and other support that they could hardly be compared 1:1 to light troops. In some cases (mounted knights) it would be appropriate to compare them 1:3 or more.
I've read way too many books on historical warfare, but rarely have I encountered the notion that light troops might have been superior to heavy ones. The outstanding exceptions were (Parthian) light horse archers and that one victory of peltast skirmishers over Spartan hoplites. Then again, I am very confident in my assumption that not one modern author of those books has experienced a pre-firearms battle.
I remember only one source from antiquity urging the use of body armour to troops who did not use it; Vegetius****. It's worthwhile to note that he writes about body armour as the solution to military problems because the infantry of his day apparently did NOT use it. So it may be that he was a believer in body armour without actually being able to fully assess the military value upsides and downsides of the same.
I strongly suppose that investigating the true military utility of body armour in history is something that military historians should do. Modern armies should be aware that we might very well exaggerate passive protection at the expense of tactical mobility and endurance.
*: Slow, quickly exhausted, thus moving little during firefights
**: The sources are not clear and this trio may have been rather about age brackets (age 15-46 overall, velites youngest and triarii oldest), with varying equipment quality within the age brackets. It is especially doubtful whether the most or even all Triarii used mail armour, as it was very expensive. In the end, it doesn't matter to this text, for a larger share of the poor among the levied meant a larger share of troops who could not afford good arms and armour (even though those were in the late Republic purchased from the centrally procuring state). There's no source known to me claiming that anyone but proletarii (the citizens normally too poor for service as infantry) got much equipment provided by the state.
The rise of the share of velites was either driven by performance considerations or by the poverty of the levied men. Either way, the share of light infantry increased according to the known sources.
***: An example is that Romans built field camps on hills rather than close to rivers or lakes (where there's high risk of diseases) because they simply dug wells for water supply. Even in battle this was an advantage, as hills offered vastly superior positions and the Romans could wait for enemies on a hill even in Mediterranean summer heat. I have never seen mention of their enemies digging wells on campaign. The Roman armies had many such detail strengths.
There's a European (and German) policy of pursuing digital sovereignty; reducing dependence on foreign cloud servers, for example. I am no expert on the topic (I was never terribly interested in it) and cannot comment on details, but what I saw through general news media was unimpressive.
We would need to address many more vulnerabilities and would also need to change a certain government attitude to reduce our vulnerability significantly.
- - - - -
Back this summer Samsung announced that it had deactivated internet-capable Samsung TV sets that were stolen from a warehouse in South Africa. This is apparently built into all Samsung TV sets; Samsung can brick Samsung TV sets at will if they're connected to the internet. This is in principle a possibility for all kinds of internet-connected hardware.
Microsoft added a Microsoft Exchange Emergency Mitigation service recently. Exchange servers had been affected by malware to a catastrophic extent, and Microsoft developed this as a general countermeasure. To create and apply patches that remove a certain vulnerability to malware takes quite long, and malware can spread much in the meantime. It's much quicker to identify some commands the malware is using and to block those in your software. So Microsoft now builds into Exchange servers the ability to centrally brick them partially, but in effect also to brick them completely. Microsoft can de facto brick all Exchange servers whose admins haven't switched this default active emergency mitigation to off. There's no-one stopping them from coding their software to enable an override over this choice.
This points at a more general problem: Every automated software update capability is in effect a backdoor for the update provider. The software developer or someone who has thoroughly re-engineered and analysed the software can apply an update that turns the software non-functional or adds malicious functions. It can also be used to prevent further updates, as happened to some internet-of-things devices that were accidentally bricked by a poorly designed update in yet another anecdote and could not be repaired any more.
The malicious functions can include surveillance. Microphones can record sound, but loudspeakers can do so as well.
- - - - -
In other words; it's not just Samsung or Microsoft or the U.S., just about every big player has the technical opportunities to shut down our economy, and this includes the ability to cause irreparable harm to our hardware.
A great internet shut down wall as set up by Russia wouldn't help at all (theirs only makes sense as an option for political oppression), nor would blocking certain IPs in the event of crisis. No matter how many satellite and fibreglass communication links you severe, a fingernail-sized storage device can smuggle all the malware into a country that's needed to turn a domestic network computer into the attack launch point.
- - - - -
It would help to prioritise IT security over IT vulnerability. This sounds trivial if not offensively obvious, but then again we're talking about European and American governments.
So far the German government policies and the policies of the U.S., UK and so forth were aimed at implementing vulnerabilities and preventing much security and encryption. This stems from a mindset of bureaucrats who want more and more power, more and more authority - and this leads them towards favouring vulnerabilities that they themselves can then exploit. Even the BSI (German agency for IT security) has been compromised by this.
The pursuit of backdoors, unpatched vulnerabilities and encryption weaknesses to enable the own surveillance, spying and sabotage is exposing our whole civilization to hacking on a scale that lets hacking against drug dealers, kiddie porn watchers and errorists look petty and irrelevant. A warlike scale of insecurity exploits could crash government and economy to a greater degree than the 1944 bombing of Germany and bring the railroad infrastructure to a halt for weeks (the German railroad control and signal techs in use are too diverse and antique for much more sabotage through software).
Yet again, I conclude that we need political leadership to understand the issue and to turn the bureaucracies away from pursuing their self-interest, pushing them on course to serve the common good. It's an ambitious request.
P.S.: Audited open source software (compiled by the user himself) with an automatic pause for automatic updates and an unpatchable reversibility of past updates would protect us pretty well. Physically secure and separated backups are a necessity. Encryption should be one-time pad encryption with satisfactory randomisers whenever practical.
A joke for you: The Israeli arms industry sends me press releases and stuff, and one of their companies seriously tries to sell cyber defence software. As if anyone not utterly stupid would trust Israelis with his/her/its cybersecurity after all their hacking (keyword Pegasus), obvious assassination campaigns and other subversive actions. They might have sold their stuff to the lying moron, but the rest of their target audience got to be corrupt or utterly, utterly stupid. That target group is probably the same as for U.S. military trainers abroad.
Artillery high explosive fires are a complicated technical and tactical topic. Even the working of a shell itself is complicated.
The radius at which the blast of the explosives kills is rather small and incendiary effects are usually unexpected and unintended side effects. Most of the HE effect stems from fragmentation.
Fragmentation of a simple steel shell is quite unpredictable, but there are some relationships known. Such shells burst into many tiny fragments and very few large fragments, some some fragments of intermediate size.
More ductile steel will create bigger and more big fragments (which was intended for heavy anti-aircraft gun shells), whereas more brittle steel will mostly produce tiny and small fragments.
Higher yield strength steel can be used to make shell wall thinner (but still withstanding the stress of firing), which allows for more explosives volume and mass for overall greater fragmentation effect. High yield strength steel tends tends to have high ductility as well.
Higher quality explosives can in theory be used to increase the effect. Pure TNT and the cheaper mix Amatol are classics obsolete by now. There's little reason to expect anything more powerful than RDX or a RDX/TNT mix in unguided HE shells. RDX is about 60% more powerful than TNT. RDX is ancient technology by now, so we can assume that the explosives of HE shells world-wide are of about equal quality within their shelf life.
A controlled fragmentation is possible by using a serrated the shell body, and the best way to do it is to serrate on the inside (which is trickier for production, and old hand grenades often used external serration). Serration on the outside raises the question of air friction and is less effective, but easier to apply. Serration on both sides calls into question the mechanical strength of the shell body even more (huge forces apply during acceleration and imparting spin in the barrel) and more than combines the required production effort (the serration patterns should match). Serrated shell bodies are used for rockets, mortars and hand grenades, but not gun shells due to structural weakness.
externally serrated / embossed
internally serrated / embossed
Another option to improve fragmentation is to have the fragments first (steel or tungsten balls) and then embed them into a matrix that allows the fragments to fly as intended upon burst. Another option is to use coils instead of balls, but I've never seen that option with artillery or mortar HE ammunitions.
So this is the state of art; steel or even tungsten balls embedded into a matrix. You can choose the material, explosive charge and ball size to tailor the shell for a certain penetration ability at a certain distance (ingoing shell velocity for a while). There are for example a couple hand grenades with such very small preformed fragments that they're for purposes of war harmless to personnel (except unprotected eyes) at twice their lethal radius already.
Small HE munitions are more efficient at fragmentation than bigger ones ceteris paribus. This is so because of the slowing air drag to the fragments. This was the driving force behind bomblet (submunitions, many small explosive grenades inside a shell, dispersed before impact) cargo munitions (ICM / DPICM), which are now banned by the cluster munitions ban in most countries.
It's nice to have temperature insensitive munitions (that still explode well when cold) and generally insensitive munitions (that leave the crew time to run away before they explode when there's a fire around the shell).
Next, keep in mind an artillery shell needs to be fused.
The typical fuses are delay fuses, time fuses, point detonation (PD) / point detonation super quick (PDSQ) and proximity (PROX, for artillery purposes always a radio frequency fuse triggered by its echo, with some counter-jamming precautions). Most fuses know two modes, to be selected by a tool; delay and PD is a common combination.
The point of having different fuses is to choose different locations of burst. Delay bursts inside the soil (for cratering) or buildings, PD/PDSQ is a cheap way of achieving some above-ground fragmentation effect (much better if it hits a tree), but many fragments go into the ground or up into the air when you fuse upon contact with the soil. Proximity fuses are meant to fuse the shell several metres above ground, so its fragments cover a large area and also hit troops who are flat on the ground. Time fusing is too tricky to use for this in indirect fires, and more relevant to illumination and smoke munitions.
Next, let's look at the effect of angles. The angle of descent at explosion matters greatly. A shot at a very shallow angle will fragment to the sides, but project very few fragments forward. This is only OK if you use a delay fuse on flat terrain for a bouncing shot that explodes in the air after bouncing off the ground. This technique was in much use during WW2, but nowadays you simply pick PROX fuses for even better effect.
fragmentation pattern depending on angle and height of burst
A close to vertical angle is best for all-round fragmentation effect for a very slow ammunition (the picture depicts a shell moving more than twice as fast as a mortar bomb would) and greatly enlarges the lethal area compared to a 45° angle of impact. Fast-moving shells can have their optimum angle of descent well between 45° and 90°.
The angle of descent can be manipulated by howitzers (and to some degree also by most mortars) by choosing a different elevation angle and different propellant charge strength (more or less propellant modules). This also modifies the time of flight and a strong MRSI (multiple round simultaneous impact; how many shells arrive in first 10 seconds before troops in the target zone can react effectively) strike requires a mix of such combinations anyway to maximise the MRSI value.
Finally, let's keep in mind not all shells descend at the same velocity. Mortar munitions are often subsonic upon arrival, for example. This can also happen with howitzer shots. The motion of a fragment (ball) from the shell side wall is the sum of forward motion speed of the shell and sideward motion speed from the explosion. In the end, that fragment is moving diagonally forward to the side. The faster the shell at the time of explosion, the more pronounced this forward movement of the fragments. This matters much, for this forward movement means that the fragments are being driven into the ground. Fast shells need to be fused higher by the PROX fuse for optimum effect.
- - - - -
So now we have the criteria for a maximum deadly HE shell:
not moving fast at time of explosion
descending well between 45° and 90° at time of explosion
embedded steel (good price) or tungsten (best effect) balls in matrix for controlled fragmentation effect with defined effective radius against a notional target
fused by a smart proximity fuse (ideally with PDSQ as backup and a time-based safety to prevent premature explosion in face of jamming)
preferably small calibre
also preferably NATO standard calibre for economic and cooperation reasons: 155 mm
- - - - -
And this is it:
The older Russian 122 mm rocket 9M53F uses the very same principle, without the need to cope with a spin-stabilised shell's spin:
I seem to have underestimated the usefulness of the principle for spin-stabilised howitzer shells in 2015.
The ideal HE shell for suppressive fires (which have fallen a bit out of fashion as quantities of active duty artillery pieces have shrunk) and cratering is to have a cheap steel body and a PD/delay fuse. Cheap HE shells with delay fuse can also be used to intentionally create craters as obstacles especially on roads or as cover for friendly infantry. Not all firing missions have a use for high end maximum lethality ammunitions.
craters by HE shells of WW2 technology (source); quite capable of rendering roads unusable
Today we're expecting the first howitzer shots to be on target and for effect (exploiting surprise), but
we
would still shoot old school if satellite navigation systems failed and maps were insufficient. We would first use a salvo to observe where it lands,
correct until the salvo is straddling the target and then switch to quick fire for
effect. These first ranging shots would best be done with cheap HE
shells with delay fuses. The cheap shell requires less expenses
beforehand and the cheap delay fuse makes the impact very visible (thrown up
dirt) and it would be least dangerous to friendlies who are often close
to the target. The cheap and the high quality shells would better have matched external ballistics, though.
This blog post summed up enough to give the reader the basics to judge the own countries' artillery munitions approach. The German approach so far is -save for a handful of gold plated special munitions - to use insensitive explosives 155 mm HE shells with decent fuses and preformed fragments embedded in the shell walls. That would be fine, but the quantity of HE shells in stocks is (albeit not known to the public) bound to be small and part of those stocks may be older type shells at or past shelf life. Russia is widely understood to have huge quantities of really old (70's, 80's if not worse) artillery munitions, but they kept DPICM in their inventory, which gives them an advantage.
I suppose the details given here have brought across the message that the quality of HE munitions can multiply artillery effectiveness.
*: among other things like accuracy, dispersion, communications, rapid
fire control, sensors, quantity of artillery pieces, survivability of
artillery pieces, quantity of munitions, reliable high throughput supply
support, trajectory correction, placement of artillery pieces
You
may have read about the German army radio scandal: The German ministry
of defence is about to purchase up to 20,000 radios of an analogue
technology model from the early 1980's. The price per copy is expected to be
outrageous (you could buy two new small cars for one museum piece-styled radio), and the order is going to Thales because they bought the
developer of those Cold War era radios long ago.
The
need to replace the old radios was obvious many years ago already (and
published). We already missed out on buying late 1980's/1990's technology radios.
The British Bowman program disaster and the huge excess of 1980's
radios after the downsizing during the early 1990's may have
contributed to this.
The
scandal is a scandal because the need to replace the old radios was
obvious, the technological progress in the field was obvious and the
German army is obsessed with talking (and writing) about
"Führungsfähigkeit", the ability to lead (for Americans; Command and Control, C2). And it interprets this
ability in large part as the technical ability to communicate.
I
have not yet any special insights into why the bureaucracy (and
politicians!) failed so grossly, merely a couple suspicions. The list of
my suspicions is topped by the guess that they went for a gold-plated
maximum ambition solution, and then failed to get it done for the all-too-usual reasons of bureaucratic impotence. They clearly
tried to get something customised to their requirements, for there are
evidently plenty battlefield radio systems on the market,
military-off-the-shelf and there was enough money in the budget all along if you know how to prioritise.
Some blame was put on politicians who spent on other things (such as warships - the parliamentary defence committee is infested by directly elected politicians from election districts with shipyards). The bureaucracy didn't put the necessary priority and bureaucracy resources on the radio procurement, though.
The
radio procurement scandal also involves (though not mentioned in the
recent reports that I saw) a miniscule quantity purchase of some modern
radios a few years ago. AFAIK only special forces and the AFVs of a battalion for deployments received modern radios (aside from civilian satellite radios).
I
have zero confidence that this extremely embarrassing scandal will lead
to decisive change for the better. This is not a specific critique of
any particular politician or any particular party. I simply don't think
that ANY party has understood that the Bundeswehr is a bureaucracy that
needs a harsh political leadership that breaks it away from the current
path and forces a change of course towards doing the constitutional job
of the armed forces. I don't expect any officers to be fired and no
civilian bureaucrats to be kicked out of their positions of relevance at
all in this most embarrassing Bundeswehr scandal of the post-Cold War period.
The blathering in writing will go on as well. They will write about a fantasy world in which the army is focused on getting command & control right, on getting combined arms right, on getting training realism right, on getting technical readiness up and in which 30+ years old concepts and hardware are still top notch. No concerns about them being easily countered by capable opposing forces will be part of the cheerleading articles. The senior officers will tell each other that they'll keep doing their job in the ultra-competent way they've always done it, and the tactics and techniques they learned at the Führungsakademie are the global gold standard.
I'd be surprised if the politicians who take the reins (ceremonially at the very least) will be able to see through the B.S..
I lost another complete (and long) blog post text (it only missed illustrations) because of the idiotic CTRL-Z bug in Blogger that leads to the whole draft turning blank. -.-
Now the topic (field artillery calibre choice/reasoning from Interwar Years to mid Cold War) might never be rewritten.
This blog post will lay out how the cost drivers of infantry equipment can be reduced to such a degree that poorly-funded armies and reservist infantry, support field troops & air force security personnel of well-funded armed forces can be equipped properly for a dismounted fight.
Cost drivers
The #1 cost driver of infantry is the personnel itself, through direct costs, overhead costs and opportunity costs. This cannot be helped much, but you may delete excess personnel from the table of organisation and 'outsource' wartime tasks into reserves. A reservist costs but a tiny fraction of an active duty soldier in personnel expenses.
The historical cost drivers included the firearm (about 45% of a worker's monthly salary for a rifle in 1930's Germany) and clothes (especially the boots), but these aren't really the cost issues nowadays. A good firearm (quality assault rifles can cost about 1,100 € per copy in bulk purchase) and good, functional clothes (hundreds of Euros per soldier) may cost less than 2,000 € per infantryman, an average month's income of an employee in Germany. So the ratio between clothes + gun to monthly average income remained about the same, but these items are merely the basics nowadays.
Estimates about the price of equipment for a U.S. Army infantryman today are well above 15,000 €.
This infographic is about 15 years old, see also video at 27:51 here.
A proper frag protection helmet and frag protection vest should each cost much less than 500 € combined in army-level bulk purchases. Higher level protection costs more, but is very uncommon in poor army infantry, reserve infantry and among non-combat troops in general (and thus outside the scope of this text).
I don't have detailed data, but by my estimate the new big cost drivers are in no particular order
(a) night vision
(b) radio
(c) firearm sights
Sights can add a lot depending on how ambitious you are, a normal intra-squad radio adds hundreds to thousands of Euros and night vision can cost thousands of €.
Affordable equipment needs to last and have a long shelf life as well. This is necessary because reserves might take items from storage after decades of no use (just with regular counting for inventory bookkeeping). Air force security personnel are wannabe infantrymen and treat their equipment about as harshly as infantry does. Army field support units focus on their main tasks and are at risk to neglect basic infantry-ish soldiering skills and attention to equipment.
So we need long-lasting, long shelf life* affordable equipment for dismounted combat on a modern battlefield.** The price should be divided by the years this equipment lasts, with a bit of discounting of distant future years, as the equipment would stagnate in quality (save for software updates), while competing equipment improves.*** This means a shorter-lasting yet cheaper equipment can be the equivalent to a more expensive equipment in terms of utility for money AND average relative performance.
(A) night vision
The cheapest night vision for short duration is illumination by pyrotechnics, but those burn typically for 30...120 seconds and are thus not a satisfactory solution. Night vision devices have provided superior answers since the 1940's and became standard during the 1990's in decent-funded armies. The cheapest night vision devices are digital cameras, not very much unlike smartphone cameras in nature. They don't come close to the more old fashioned image intensifier tubes in their ability to multiply light, though. Digital cameras would need extra light sources in overcast or new moon nights. Still, the technology CAN be extremely cheap (by comparison to other night vision), and shelf life well in excess of 10 years seems very feasible.
My proposal is a combination of digital night vision goggles, cheap IR aiming lasers, fluorescent bullet bases (tracer-like effect), COTS**** batteries and IR Illumination drones. (Only squad and platoon leaders would get some (cheap) thermal sight.)
Helmet-mounted digital night vision binoculars should be available to a bulk buyer at about 100 € per copy. It should be mentioned that digital night vision is consuming much more
electrical power than analogue tech, so the supply and recharging of
batteries is quite a burden by comparison.
The cheap IR lasers are visible only with night vision devices. You could have a simple laser trigger on a fore grip with both battery and laser installed in that very same fore grip. Such cheap IR lasers would be very effective aiming aids with helmet-mounted night vision devices at the relevant combat distances for the intended users. Price about 30 €
Fluorescent bullet bases should be more than bright enough with digital night vision goggles. The commercially available fluorescent tracer bullets are indeed too bright; the tracer effect should only be visible to night vision tech from behind. They would allow troops to see what others are shooting at, not just what others are aiming at (which can be shown with the aiming lasers). Every bit less confusion and cluelessness is welcome in nighttime firefight stress. (Cartridges are munitions, not weapons or personal equipment. I won't add the price of this.)
COTS batteries; AA AAA or CR2032 batteries won't become obsolescent anytime soon, and the ability to switch off the lights of red dot sights means that no tritium-illuminated sight is giving you away to night vision users at night. The price of such commercial batteries is negligible.
IR Illum drones; I wrote about IR Illum pyrotechnics weeks ago, and I also mentioned the duration issue. It's likely MUCH smarter to have an artificial 'moon' (silent, unpredictably-manoeuvering drone at 100+ m altitude below cloud cover with a wide angle LED IR light) with 10...30 minutes on-station time. Someone 2+ km away would have to launch one such drone every 10...30 minutes, recharge the recovered ones and adapt the autopilot programming to changing needs. This should be less effort and cheaper after a night or two than using IR Illum a lot.
The soldiers could additionally deploy their own thrown LED beacons (set to flashing or illumination); a COTS battery coupled with a LED light and almost nothing else (example here). Their costs would be tiny (less than 5 € per copy including the battery) in a huge bulk purchase. Such LED beacons can also be used for communication, such as marking mine-free lanes, communicating to air power, marking cleared rooms and so on.
(B) radio
Intra-squad radios are a great tool, but they can also be quite costly. You can gold-plate them A LOT, up to complete inertial navigation system with occasional GPS/Galileo use, alerting for incoming indirect fires or aerial threats, NBC alert, voice-to-text and text-to-voice for minimizing data transmission needs, encryption/decryption. Alternatively, you could go for really cheap stuff that works under favourable conditions out to 400 m and costs 30 € per pair in toy stores.
I suppose it's possible to find a middle ground; a bulk order for 100,000 pieces without (AA) batteries should be doable at prices that even the worst-funded NATO armies can afford. 128 bit encryption/decryption seems doable at that price. I say € 10 M including development effort; 100 € per copy for the launch customer for 100k items bulk purchase. This is still multiple times the price of Linux-capable maker computer boards with CPU, graphics and stuff. A self-made software-defined radio with encryption/decryption capability ends up at less than 50 € material cost in retail prices, by the way!
You can't have such prices if you don't encourage non-arms industries offers in your tender, of course. Harris, Thales and the likes would never offer such a price. Their rifleman radios cost thousands of Euros per copy.
(C) firearm sights
I've been arguing in favour of rather short infantry combat distances (at the very most 400 m dismounted vs. dismounted for assault rifles, but only up to 200 m is really relevant) for a while because you did something wrong if you can be seen from more than 100 m distance and you shouldn't give your position away with needless shooting before you were detected. Leave all the 300+ m targets to snipers, AFVs, indirect fires or collect intelligence by observing them rather than forcing them to become more stealthy! Shorter combat ranges also allow for more lightweight weapons, munitions and sights.
The natural conclusion for affordable sights is thus a red dot sight with an integral on/off switch and CR2032 battery power (COTS). Sights for longer ranges aren't needed. The price per red dot sight could be as low as € 50. Quality sights cost a lot more, but this is about making it affordable for troops who would usually not have quality sights anyway. Red dot sights (and their batteries) could be trusted down to -20° C. This would usually suffice, and a very simple (100 m fixed range) folding 'iron' sight could be installed as backup. Even a cheap red dot sight is a huge improvement over iron sights in the stress of battle (not so much on a firing range).
Maybe I'm delusional here, but I estimate the normally just assault rifle + clothes + helmet equipped support soldier of some Eastern European NATO army or Western European army reserves could be turned into a much more effective and thus much more confident (and this is the real value here!) night combat-capable rifleman at the staggering price tag of about 300 € plus 300 € per infantry squad and platoon (COTS thermal imagers for small unit leaders to enhance detection) and another 20,000 € at unit or battalion level (for the illumination drones set). (This leaves frag protection vests out as they are already widespread in use.)
Let's assume a hypothetical support battalion of 300 personnel with 10 platoons and 30 squads. This sums up to about 122,000 € modernization cost for the whole formation. The illumination drone team of two might need a cheap 4x2 vehicle, let's assume 15,000 € for that as well. The expense per head stands at about 450 €. This is affordable. It would shock our procurement agencies with its lack of mil spec robustness, but the alternative is to have no night vision other than an NCO's flare gun and flashlights, usually only iron sights only, and no intra-squad radios at all.
This applies just as much to infantry of poor non-NATO countries and of course also to stored sets for reservists and 'rear' area troops in well-funded armed services.
Everybody nowadays agrees that the red, blue, white uniforms of the absolutism era and even 19th century would be a horrible idea on a modern battlefield. They made troops especially visible and identifiable, which made the commanding of formations on a battlefield easier. Firearms improved in firepower, and it became imperative to seek concealment, cover, camouflage and be dispersed.
The French persisted in using colourful uniforms into WWI
(correctly colourised photo)
The reason why such easily visible uniforms are obsolete is that they're too easy to detect and identify. You cannot afford that on a modern battlefield because firepower has become terribly lethal (and the partial bulletproofing of infantry doesn't change this).
That's EXACTLY the reason why I think that ALL uniforms - including modern ones - are obsolete.
What? You think it's not that easy to see a camouflage pattern-clothed soldier outdoors at 100 m?
Me neither, but you should stop thinking with your eyes. This is the age of electronics. It's a decades-old story that law enforcement uses aerial sensors to find marijuana plants based on their colour spectrum.* This is literally something that can be done with a man-portable drone over several kilometres range.
Likewise, all those exactly military specification-following camouflage clothes and vehicle camouflage paint jobs (and even the industrially-made ghillies and camouflage nets) can (as far as I know) be detected quite easily by their spectral fingerprint. They stand out to a appropriately-prepared sensor and computer as bright red would do.
A typical man is unable to correctly name more than two or three shades of green. Some Amazonian tribe reputedly knows 50 names for different shades of green. A computer can correctly identify ten thousands of shades of green in less than 1/1000th of a second.
Weathering of colours (such as many times washed clothes, or old vehicle paint jobs) is very likely something that the algorithm can simply take into account. The false alarm rate may be an issue, but today's machine learning methods and an ability to zoom in on a first detection for confirmation should render false alarm rates acceptable.
Camouflage patterns are furthermore patterns. Repeat, patterns. Pattern recognition is one of the strengths developed for computers in the past two decades. Camouflages patterns are difficult to discern from certain backgrounds for a human brain at certain distances - but a dedicated computer algorithm can identify such patterns easily regardless of context.
In the end, technology may spell doom for uniforms and standardised vehicle paint jobs for battlefield usage, leaving us with uniforms for non-battlefield troops, which would be a relic - largely devoid of function.
The things that may be redeemable about battlefield uniforms are their shapes (cut) and materials.
Predictability hurts in warfare - and what's more predictable than an army wearing the same clothes and painting all its vehicles alike, for decades?
Figure 4 shows the problem; the amouflage fabric looks like foliage to us humans, but a spectrum analysis shows something completely different. Figure 6 reminds me of how algorithms can easily discern a small boat from a background of seawater and white spray - the effective contrast is much greater to the algorithm than to the human brain.
P.S.: Years ago I wrote that camo pattern uniforms are fine for non-combat, non-reconnaissance troops, but combat and reconnaissance troops should strive for better camouflage effect than possible with standard pattern uniforms. Ghillie-like camo jackets modified for the local and seasonal environment, for example. Camo pattern clothing risks suggesting that it's good-enough camo by itself, but both combat and recce troops should strive for better stealth than that. One way to ensure this could be to give them monochrome grey, green or brown camo clothes (at least for the torso). Now I think that maybe the visible parts of such a colour base layer could be very troublesome.
An Israeli firm exhibited a supposedly world-first drone in July*; it is a loitering kamikaze drone that combined a passive radio frequency seeker with rather ordinary electro-optical and thermal sensors.
(marketing video; don't believe everything you see in advertising)
It appears to be the product of the 'small Harop' development project (I could have checked this, but it's too peripheral and I'm no paid author here).
This drone is no doubt still rather expensive (think: car to super sports car price range) and it's big, but let's assume that costs and sizes go down over time as usual and make such drones/missiles affordable in large quantities.
The new face of air dominance** would not be thousands of P-47s, Typhoons and other tactical aircraft over Normandy '44 or hundreds of A-10s and supersonic jets slaughtering withdrawing Iraqis in 1991: It could be thousands of loitering (and in case of no success returning for recovery) drones that do not only search for targets with thermal sensors (often based on cues by dedicated recce assets), but also detect almost all*** kinds of radio emissions as a lead for further investigations with IIR and E/O. Multiple communicating drones could pinpoint emitter locations precisely by triangulating, so ceasing emissions is of little help against drones that can look with imaging infrared sensors and know very well where to look.
Movements would compromise stealth as they did in '44 and ever since, but so would also many uses of radar and radio communications.
This is not only a horror scenario for underfunded small country armed forces fearing that their country might be targeted for bullying by some great power(s): Such oppressive use of drone airpower might be the fate of those who neglect updating their idea of air war and reorienting their battlefield air defences in time. An once-a-decade investment of € 1 bn with almost no operating costs might suffice to dull the tip of the spear of two mechanised NATO brigades.
*: This blog post was actually written and scheduled for publication on July 15th.
**: This is about the exploitation of air dominance. How to gain and sustain it is a different issue.
***: Some radio frequencies have so very high atmospheric dampening and some such emitters so very low power that detection is impractical beyond uselessly short distances. This includes wireless communication between personally electronics carried by the same person or vehicle. Other radio links would be directional and some radars would 'look' horizontally with too little emission power upwards to where the drones would be.
It's a couple years old, but I suppose it could be relevant for windows of subsonic aviation and land vehicles in regard to avoiding the glare that's in daylight more of an issue than whether your camo paintjob is plain grey or some fancy digital six-colour pattern. This glare issue is why AFVs and many battlefield helicopters have only flat glass areas that reflect direct sunlight only in one direction instead of in many like a beacon.
This is a humorous collage showing Russian troops on Kabul airport. It made me wonder whether there's a point to having a tail gunner position AND a bow gunner position on military transport aircraft after all.
Ich meine ja schon seit Jahren, dass es wichtig ist, über den Schwachsinn der in Amerika abgeht informiert zu sein. Deren Schwachsinn schwappt häufiger mal nach Europa über. Diese Verquickung von rechter Propaganda/Hetze/Angstmacherei mit Verkauf von Büchern, Nahrungsergänzungsmitteln, Gold, Waffen und Post-Apokalypse Ausrüstung (zum Beispiel schwachsinnig unzureichend kleine Mengen von Saatgut) ist dort schon seit langem ein offensichtlicher Bestandteil des rechtsradikalen Subkultur. Beispiele:
Auch beliebt ist die Abzocke als Geschäftsmodell bei weißen Evangelikalen "Predigern" (insbesondere beim 'prosperity gospel' mit dem "seed" Schwachsinn), die sich auch mit Rechtsradikalen vermischen, weil sie nicht blöd sind und wissen, dass der Rechtsradikalismus ein Sammelbecken für Schwachköpfe und andere Leichtgläubige ist. Das ist genau die Zielgruppe, die Evangelikale für ihren eigene Maschen brauchen.
Diese Abzocke mit eigentlich offensichtlichem Schwachsinn erzeugt also ein Profitmotiv und auch finanzielle Fähigkeiten für antidemokratische Gruppen, die einen Großteil ihrer Landsleute einfach nur noch hassen.
